I applied on June 16th, 3 weeks later had a 30-minute video call with the recruiter. The recruiter was about 5 minutes late. I did send a quick email if rescheduling was necessary, but the recruiter jumped on the call and politely excused themselves. The interview was easy, with general questions about my background. The recruiter asked for my salary, which was 80K a year, she was unable to provide a salary range for the role when I asked if this was in line, a salary range was never reviewed again after this. A week later I received an email to participate in a “business case”. If I could title this interview, it would be a “Learning Experience”. They requested a press release, boilerplate, and pretty much an entire media strategy for a service rollout, oh yea, with a 2-3 day turnaround! I pretty much spent my weekend researching and brainstorming and when it came to writing the boilerplate, they had limited company information. But I did my best and submitted my materials. I felt uneasy after submitting all that material and did some quick research and found that if an employer asks for a recruitment task it should not take any longer than a couple of hours, anything more than that is considered consultation work. I got a bad gut feeling and visited their website and saw the copy on their “about us” was now there, maybe it was a coincidence, a website glitch, or temporarily hidden so candidates can create original copy? The third step is a 90-minute Slack Interview with team members on the communications team and 2 HR personnel sitting in. Their first question was regarding how I would roll out a digital strategy, this is after I had already submitted the deck. It seemed like they were trying to fish for more ideas or a new approach that wasn’t submitted. I thought the Slack "chat" would have been a great opportunity to have a dialogue about my approach on the tasks I spent hours on and my thought process behind it. In my response I did bring up the project as an example of what I would do, I wasn’t trying to be rude, but it seemed redundant, the literal response was “ok, got it” and they moved on to the next question. It was almost like yea, ok what other ideas you got for us? I didn’t budge on this, the rest of the interview questions were fair, balanced, and solid inquiries regarding my background and experience. I did receive a rejection email a week later with feedback that my experience was not “suitable”. Next time I will limit hiring projects to no more than a day- or- request that the work not directly benefit a future employer like requesting they come up with a faux company and product exercise, and of course submit a copyright protection phrase with any material submitted. Some constructive feedback for them is to be transparent about salary in the first interview, candidates are given complex assignments with an over month hiring process not knowing where they stand on compensation. Also, I would suggest changing the type of exercise they require candidates to complete, sooner or later they'll end up in hot water.