Unfortunately I am going to be adding to the chorus of applicants in this thread who put forth considerable effort during the application process and did not get an offer. My story is similar. I applied online, got a response about 10 days later, and was scheduled for a phone screen. The phone screen was the shortest one I've ever experienced and none of the questions were hard. I got the sense that the screener had locked himself in a conference room with a long list of 15-minute calls to execute. About a week later I got a request for a "take home test" at 4pm on a Friday. They asked me to do a 1-page strategy and also write up a plan for a what-if scenario. They wanted it back on Monday, so there went 5 hours of my weekend. I was a little hesitant to give them the farm on the project because I had had a recent experience writing up a competitive review for a different company, and they basically took the analysis and then pulled the job listing. Which is exactly what happened at Thumbtack. About 10 days after I submitted the test, I got a message that they had decided not to fill the job, but that they were impressed with my work. I get the sense that a lot of companies are crowd-sourcing creative content through phony job listings. I will never know for sure if this company is one of them. The people I spoke with appeared professional and the company gets 4.5 stars on Glassdoor. However, I'm going to be very careful in the future about how much original content I pass over to an interviewer with no guarantee of an offer.