After a very reasonable CV submission process, the next step is to write a 400-600 word article for free per a vague brief that could easily be 2000 words. (None of their own blog posts are less than 1200-1500 words.) Have fun doing report-level research so you can understand a broad topic in their industry well enough to figure out which 10% of the information you can leave in while still keeping it “differentiated.”
They encourage you to use AI, but I have to assume this is because they don’t know how to use AI. Setting up a content workflow that actually produces differentiated content is a lot of work. It rarely makes sense for one article—largely because you have to do all the same research you would normally do to validate outputs while building lengthy instructional and context-setting documentation for the AI. You need to create a brand style guide, develop customer persona information, define product positioning, do a competitor analysis (otherwise how do you know if something really is differentiated?), figure out what industry sources are authoritative—and all of that is just to lay the contextual groundwork so the AI understands how to frame the output. Then you need to set up a research protocol, a writing protocol, editing steps and some way to validate the article. You can get AI to produce the documentation, but you still need to validate everything yourself. Doing it properly takes at least a full day.
And then you have to produce the actual article with a 50/50 chance it will still come out wrong. AI content workflows normally require a lot of feedback over several articles to get to a point where doesn't need heavy-handed edits.
Apart from the assignment being poorly designed, front-loading the application process with a massive, time-consuming task is fundamentally exploitative. It exploits applicants’ desperation in an extremely competitive and uncertain job market by pressing the employer’s already-totally-imbalanced-power advantage to make them go to extraordinary lengths to give Zanda what amounts to a minor convenience.
Do you really need a custom writing sample, in addition to the portfolios everyone already submitted, before you bother to speak to the candidate at all?
Forcing applicants to spend days working on an unpaid assignment is crazy when they still have to go through multiple interviews and might be excluded for reasons that have nothing to do with it. It should be obvious to anyone who bothers to think about other people that large assignments should be reserved for a shortlist of 2-3 candidates at the end of the process. You asked us all to submit the task along with video responses to 3 questions. You couldn't have just split this into two steps? What happens when someone who spent 2-3 days working on a thoughtful, well-researched article fumbles on a 3-minute video response? Do you even bother to look at it?
And what is even more infurating is that 3 days after I submitted it, I got an email saying the position had already been filled. Not only did they force me to complete this crazy assignment, they let me do it while they were already in late stage interviews/negotiations with final candidates. Unbelievable!
It’s hard to believe that such cavalier, callous behavior is coming from a company founded by someone who was ostensibly trained as a doctor charged with protecting people’s mental health.
And it becomes much grosser when you think about the collective sacrifice: only one person is getting this job! If you moved 20 people to stage 2, and each of them spent an average of two days completing the assignment (conservative estimate), the process you designed necessarily wastes more than a week of labor!
How you treat people when you have the power says a lot about you. Future applicants beware.
