I received an initial email that my profile had been selected to move forward. Then I had a call with the talent recruiter, who shared that the first step to move forward was to do a product exercise/assignment. About a week later I delivered a presentation covering the assignment. The work had been triple-checked with peers and mentors. Three days after delivering I received feedback.
The process was fine, but the response from the hiring manager was unprofessional and disrespectful.
"- Federico's assignment was good but not quite at our bar.
- There was a lot of fluffy content which was not concise and directly
what we were asking for in all cases.
- I was confused about how the content outline (slide 2) mapped to the
questions I asked, so it was difficult to follow in terms of looking
for the exact 4 questions I was evaluating him on.
- I didn't like the generic imagery added to the deck. I thought it
was non-value add and overly polished. I would have preferred the
candidate focus on the substance rather than look."
This should and could have been handled professionally. Instead, they just take the ideas and criticize without even understanding what was delivered. My outline - slide 2 - was mapped to the four questions they aked. To focus on 'not liking the images' was absurd. To call my work 'fluff' is an utter lack of respect. They are outsourcing ideas through interview cases. I see another review saying the same. At least have the balls to speak to the candidates and let them present instead of sending this type of feedback hiding anonymously behind the recruiter of the company.