[lettersdigits]

> I was once asked to basically create a clone of Yelp in a week

That's just unfair, inconsiderate and unsustainable, and is also a red flag (ie: I would not go to that company).

Giving up a week of your life for an interview ?

and for free ?

And most importantly - what if ALL companies did this ? you would have to spend months working from home, for free, just to get to the next level of the hiring process .

I don't know what the solution IS, but I know for sure that it IS NOT a 1-week work-from-home-for-free task .

(edit:formatting and some grammar)

Edit2: people will actually pay good money for a yelp (or craigslist/etc/etc) clone on places like upwork. And they asked you to do it for free .

[andai]

You just gave me an idea.. you could actually run an entire company on nothing but free work by candidates doing "homework assignments"...

[lettersdigits]

:)

it is probably something like : 1. go to upwork

2. find a 2-3 hours task (eg: scrape entire site [sitename].com, design a logo etc. etc.

3. give the same task to 5 different candidates

4. choose the best one

5. make profit and gain upwork cred

6. send a "thanks but we chose a different candidate" email to all the candidates

7. repeat

(edit:formatting)

edit2: you can even let candidate X make a code review on candidate Y.

step 8: automate the process and go public

[user5994461]

Managing all the candidates and submissions is actually a full time work.