The interview felt perfect – until they sent a “small test task.” I was applying for a senior marketing role at a fancy digital agency in the heart of Manchester, a place with exposed brick walls and a beanbag in every corner. The manager, a guy named Alistair who wore expensive glasses and spoke in buzzwords, told me they just needed to see how I handled a “live scenario.” I was desperate for the job, so when the brief landed in my inbox, I didn’t question the scale of it.
One evening turned into three days of unpaid work, edits, and deadlines. They asked for a full social media strategy, three blog posts, and a detailed competitor analysis for one of their “potential” clients, a luxury watch brand. I stayed up until 2 a.m. every night, fueled by black coffee and the hope that this was the final hurdle. I poured my best ideas into those slides, creating a unique “heritage-meets-modern” campaign that I was genuinely proud of.
Then I got rejected. A week after I submitted the work, I received a short message saying they had “decided to move in another direction.” There was no feedback on the task I had spent twenty hours on, just a cold, automated-sounding template. I felt like I had been punched in the gut, wondering if my ideas weren’t as good as I thought, or if I just wasn’t the right “cultural fit.”
I tried to put it behind me and kept applying for other roles, but I noticed something strange. A week later, I was scrolling through my social media feed when an ad for that same luxury watch brand popped up. My heart skipped a beat as I looked at the caption. It was the exact hook I had written in my test task, word for word, paired with the specific aesthetic I had outlined in my strategy.
I clicked through to their main page, and my stomach did a slow, nauseating flip. They weren’t just using one line; they had launched the entire campaign I designed. The graphics were slightly different, but the messaging, the target audience segments, and even the specific hashtags were all pulled directly from my unpaid labor. Alistair hadn’t moved in another direction; he had moved in my direction without paying for the ticket.
I sat at my kitchen table, feeling a mix of hot rage and deep humiliation. I felt like a fool for giving away my intellectual property for free, but more than that, I felt invisible. I called a friend who worked in employment law, but she told me that without a signed contract or a non-disclosure agreement, it would be an uphill battle to prove they stole it. “It happens all the time,” she sighed. “It’s called ‘brew-dogging,’ where companies use interviews to crowdsource free ideas.”
I couldn’t just let it go, though. I decided to do a little bit of detective work on the “watch brand” itself. I noticed that the agency had tagged the brand’s new Creative Director in one of their celebratory posts about the “highly successful” launch. Her name was Penelope, and she had a very professional, no-nonsense LinkedIn profile. I took a deep breath and decided to send her a message, not with an angry demand, but with a polite inquiry.
I sent Penelope a PDF of the original work I had submitted to the agency, along with the timestamps showing it was created two weeks before their campaign went live. I told her I was a huge fan of the brand and was thrilled to see the direction they took, but I wanted to know if the agency had credited the freelance consultant who developed the core concepts. I didn’t mention I was a rejected job applicant; I just presented the facts as a professional who “hoped there hadn’t been a misunderstanding.”
Two days passed without a word, and I assumed I had been ignored again. I went back to my job search, feeling even more defeated. But on Friday afternoon, my phone rang with an unknown number. It was Penelope. She didn’t sound like a corporate robot; she sounded absolutely furious, but not at me. She told me that Alistair’s agency had billed them a massive “conceptual fee” for the campaign, claiming it was developed by their “senior in-house creative team” over several months.
She told me that the brand took intellectual property very seriously and that they were currently terminating their contract with the agency for breach of ethics. “I don’t like being lied to,” she said firmly. “And I certainly don’t like my brand being built on stolen labor.” Then she asked me a question that changed everything: “If you’re the one who actually came up with this strategy, why aren’t you the one managing it for us?”
Penelope wasn’t just firing the agency; she was bringing the work in-house. She offered me a freelance contract on the spot to manage the rest of the campaign at a rate that was triple what I would have made as an employee at the agency. I was stunned. I went from being a rejected candidate to being the primary consultant for a luxury brand in the span of a phone call.
A month into my contract, while I was working out of Penelope’s office, I found out why Alistair had rejected me in the first place. Penelope showed me a feedback form the agency had sent her when they were still pretending they had a “team” working on the project. Alistair had written that I was “technically proficient but lacked the creative spark required for high-level branding.”
He had actually tried to lower my value in the eyes of his client while simultaneously stealing my work to prove his own worth. It was a calculated move to make sure I wouldn’t be a threat if I ever found out what they were doing. Seeing those words in black and white hurt, but looking at the campaign’s soaring engagement numbers hurt Alistair a lot more. The agency ended up losing three other major clients after word got out about their “test task” practices.
I realized that the “perfect” interview I thought I had wasn’t perfect at all. It was a trap designed to find someone talented but desperate enough to over-deliver. If I had gotten that job, I would have spent years working for a man who would have claimed every one of my successes as his own. The rejection wasn’t a failure; it was a rescue mission that I didn’t recognize at the time.
I’m now running my own small consultancy, and I have a very strict rule for my own hiring process. I never ask for unpaid test tasks that take more than an hour, and I always pay candidates for their time if I intend to use their ideas in a real-world scenario. I’ve learned that the way a company treats you when they owe you nothing is the best indicator of how they’ll treat you when they owe you everything.
The conclusion of this journey wasn’t just the lucrative contract or the satisfaction of seeing Alistair lose his client. It was the moment I realized that I didn’t need a beanbag chair and a fancy office to be a “senior creative.” I just needed to trust my own voice and have the courage to speak up when someone tried to silence it. My work had value all along; I just had to find the right person to see it.
Life has a funny way of directing you toward where you’re supposed to be, even if the path feels like it’s paved with rejection and frustration. We often see a “no” as a wall, but sometimes it’s just a guardrail keeping us from falling off a cliff. If I hadn’t been rejected, I never would have sent that message to Penelope, and I’d still be fetching coffee for Alistair in Manchester.
The lesson I carry with me now is simple: never let anyone make you feel like your skills are a “test” they are doing you a favor by grading. You are the expert of your own craft, and you deserve to be compensated for the energy you put into the world. When one door closes, don’t just stand there staring at the wood; look for the window that someone else left open.
Your worth isn’t defined by a hiring manager’s template email. It’s defined by the quality of what you create and the integrity with which you stand behind it. If a company doesn’t value your time during the interview, they will never value your life during the employment. Trust your gut, protect your work, and always keep the receipts.
If this story reminded you to stand up for your own value, please share and like this post. We need to stop the culture of unpaid “test tasks” and start respecting the talent that keeps these industries running. Would you like me to help you draft a polite but firm response to a company asking for an unreasonable amount of unpaid work?
