Frustrated job seekers often take to social media, especially Reddit, to share their bizarre stories while dealing with recruiters. One such story was shared by a man who claimed that a Hong Kong startup founder and CEO “tricked” him into doing six hours of unpaid work disguised as an interview for a job.
Sharing his terrible experience on r/recruitinghell, a subreddit dedicated to bad recuritment stories, the man said that he applied for a software engineering role and the founder of the startup was the one conducting the interview for the position.
“He noticed I had experience with a specific design software (not relevant to the job) and asked for another meeting to assess my skills in it,” he said.
Kept insisting on more work
In the next meeting, he was surprised to see the CEO sharing production-level files for him to edit. He added that he did not even have the software needed for the task but the CEO insisted on completing the task and made him sign up for a trial version of it.
“We spent about an hour setting up a trial version, only to realize he didn’t have the right files. I ended up just explaining how I would do it, and showed him past complex projects I’d done. Still, he insisted on another session,” he added.
The third meeting happened at an odd hour, late in the night where the CEO insisted the task be completed on time. “Just as I was nearly done, the software crashed. I explained the rest, thinking that would be enough. But no—he asked me to do it again. And again, his software kept crashing. Two attempts later, I finally finished,” he said.
Ghosted by CEO
He added that the CEO eagerly downloaded the files which felt off to him as most companies use dummy files to just test the skills. The candidate revealed that once the files were with the CEO, he completely ghosted him.
“Total silence. No reply to follow-ups. No rejection. Just ghosted. I realised I’d been used for 6 hours of free labour—he got real work done through his “interview process,” he added.
The post was full of comments from users who were furious by the unprofessional behaviour of the CEO and asked the user to either bill the company to pay for his time or name and shame them.
“You were 100% used, this wasn’t an interview, it was unpaid freelance work. Real companies don’t ask candidates to fix production files, especially late at night, or ghost them afterward. You did nothing wrong by trusting the process, but they crossed every line,” said one of them.
Another advised, “I’m sorry you went through that. Keep the lesson and stop that before it happens again, I think that after the second interview you should jump off the process.”