Excessive take home task?
I’m curious what people consider a reasonable amount of time to spend on a take-home task while working full-time?
I recently did a test project for a role (super specific industry so I won’t disclose, but I’ve got a lot of experience with this kind of product). I spent around 7–8 hours on the actual video over the course of a week (mostly evenings after work), plus some additional time on a presentation deck.
In the interview I asked and they mentioned that internally it would probably be more like a 4-day task, and a lot of the feedback focused on additional polish/detail that I deffo would’ve added with more time.
I totally understand that any creative work can always be pushed further, but it did leave me wondering where people draw the line with unpaid tasks? It was a 60s promo video so spending 8 hours on it was already a rush, but I wasn’t about to spend any longer on it. Typically in my experience people usually ask for 4-6 hours.
For context, I’m midweight/senior-ish with ~5 years industry experience, so I approached it more as “showing my thinking/process/ability” rather than trying to produce a fully polished piece. I think the final outcome is definitely post-ready but of course you can always spend more time adding more details
Genuinely curious how others approach this because I’m not sure what’s considered normal anymore, and I’ve been job hunting for 6 months now with no success 🫠
Edited to add:
For those who are saying they refuse take home tasks- have any of you had success in actually getting a role when refusing? I can’t image they’d ask me to do a task and then still be happy hiring me over another candidate that actually did it, and I want a new job 🤣