[olooney]

Yes. They're not testing your knowledge of etiquette, people skills, or friendliness though. They're looking for a more basic and far more widely applicable skill: following best practices. If you were configuring Apache for the first time, wouldn't you google for a list of do's and don'ts and spend a few minutes implementing the low-hanging fruit? Not doing that puts you at a huge risk of leaving a huge security hole or massive performance hit, right? It would be amateurish, and if a problem occurred because you didn't take even a few minutes to do the most basic and widely known stuff, you would have no excuse.

Likewise, while nobody really cares about thank you emails, not doing that suggests you didn't even bother to Google "Interview Tips" and implement the ones that took less than a few minutes. That's not a good signal to send to people that are going to have to rely on your professionalism and quality of work for the next few years.

[jgwil2]

This would make sense except that the job isn't interviewing for jobs. You shouldn't hold people to the expectation that they're going to approach communicating with recruiters in the same way they would approach actual work they were actually getting paid for. This is a great way to filter good candidates out based on something that has nothing to do with the work you are hiring for.

[jonfw]

This doesn't just have nothing to do with the work you are hiring for, this is testing for something that's actually a negative trait in your work.

Technical writing should be as concise and clear as possible