English 
German The first call went well. I liked the interviewer. The conversation had that easy energy you hope for in a hiring process: good rapport, real curiosity, the feeling that both sides might have found something worth exploring.
Then she explained the next round. It would be a design exercise. I would redesign a section of their existing product, send it over, and if the CEO liked it I would move forward.
I had not heard a request like that in years, and the old feeling came back faster than I expected. Early in my career I did a lot of things because I wanted the opportunity, because I did not want to seem difficult, because some older or more confident person had framed an unreasonable request as normal. I thought I was past the emotional charge of that. Apparently I was not. I sat there listening to a company ask me to redesign part of its product for free, and all the old anger from being young and exploitable rose in my body at once.
The company made software for churches, which somehow made it worse. I know that is not a serious argument. A church-software company can have the same immature hiring process as anyone else. Still, I remember thinking: really, you of all people?
Seeing where the line is
A design exercise is not automatically unethical. A short, structured exercise can help both sides learn something. If I sit with a team for 30 or 40 minutes and work through a fictional problem, they can see how I ask questions, handle constraints, think visually, and explain tradeoffs. Braden Kowitz wrote a useful version of this years ago for GV: a well-scoped problem, solved on the spot, usually in 15 to 40 minutes, with the point being to see how someone thinks rather than to collect a polished answer. That is a different thing from asking a candidate to go home and redesign your actual product.
The field has had language for this for a long time. AIGA’s position on spec work says people doing design should be compensated fairly for the value of their work and should negotiate ownership or use rights for their intellectual and creative property. It also warns that speculative work creates risks around quality, intellectual property, and economic fairness. Work has value before a company decides whether to hire you, and a hiring process should not require you to pretend otherwise.
Understanding why people still say yes
The harshest thing about unpaid exercises is that they punish the candidates with the least slack. If you have savings, a calm calendar, and several options, you can say no and feel principled. If you need work now, principle starts to feel expensive.
The Federal Reserve’s 2025 household well-being report found that 63 percent of U.S. adults could cover a $400 emergency expense with cash or its equivalent. That means 37 percent could not cover that small emergency in the cleanest way, and 30 percent said they could not cover three months of expenses by any means if they lost their main source of income. When that is the background, saying no is not just a matter of confidence. Sometimes it has a price.
This is why I dislike the moral theater around “knowing your worth.” It is true that people doing the work should know their worth. It is also true that rent is due on the first. Companies benefit from that tension. Some do it knowingly; some just inherit a lazy hiring ritual and never ask who it filters out. Either way, the result is the same: the candidate with fewer obligations, more free time, or a partner covering the bills can compete more easily than the equally talented person with a child, a second job, a visa concern, or no financial cushion.
Employers benefit from that pressure, whether they mean to or not. Greenhouse’s 2024 Candidate Experience Report found that 19 percent of U.S. job seekers named time-consuming take-home assignments or tests without financial compensation as one of the top challenges they had faced in the previous year. The same report found that U.S. job seekers were also ghosted after take-home assignments or tests. The exact number is less important than the pattern: a company can ask for hours of unpaid work, keep the candidate hopeful, and then disappear.
Remembering the larger pattern
The design exercise was not the only time I saw this kind of thing. Around the same period, another company approached me about creating a curriculum for a 10-week UX design course. They wanted the whole thing built in four weeks and offered $5,000.
The course would cost students about $4,000 each. The company would be able to sell it again and again. I would have needed brutal weeks just to have a chance of delivering something decent, and I would have walked away with less than a month of San Francisco living costs.
I countered with $50,000 plus 10 percent of course sales for two years. They declined(lol). What stayed with me was what happened later. I checked their site and saw that a former coworker of mine had taken the project. The person was skilled and well respected. It pissed me off. I do not know what his situation was. It pissed me off that the company didn’t just find someone to accept those ridiculous terms, they found found someone really good.
That is the part people miss when they talk about these things as individual confidence problems. Yes, I had to learn to set boundaries. I also had to understand that companies often structure the game so somebody with less bargaining power eventually says yes. The company then gets to tell itself the offer was fair because someone accepted it, even though acceptance is not the same as fairness.
Choosing better ways to evaluate design judgment
If a company wants to evaluate design judgment, there are better options than unpaid homework.
Start with the portfolio, but do not treat it like a gallery. Ask the candidate to walk through a project from ambiguity to decision. Ask what they tried that failed. Ask which constraint changed the work. Ask what they would do differently now. A strong candidate should be able to explain the thinking behind the artifact, and a good interviewer should be able to tell the difference between ownership and theater.
If you need to see collaboration, do a live working session. Keep it short. Use a fictional or safely abstracted problem. Tell the candidate what you are looking for: problem framing, trade-offs, questions, facilitation, systems thinking, visual judgment, whatever actually matters for the role. Let them ask questions. Let them show how they think with other people in the room, because design is rarely a silent solo performance anyway.
If you insist on a take-home exercise, pay above market rates for it and put boundaries around it. State the time box. State the evaluation criteria. Do not use the candidate’s work in production. Do not ask for high-fidelity work unless high fidelity is the point of the role. Do not pretend a four-hour assignment will take forty-five minutes. And if a candidate reaches the final stage, reject them with enough care to prove you noticed the time they gave you.
Candidates can set boundaries too. The script does not need to be dramatic. Ask what the exercise involves, how long it is expected to take, whether it relates to current company work, how it will be scored, who will review it, whether compensation is available, and what feedback candidates receive afterward. If the answers are vague, that is useful information.
My own answer now is simple. I will do a portfolio review. I will do a short live working session. I will consider a paid trial project with clear scope and rights. I will not spend a weekend solving a company’s product problem for free so that a room of people can “see how I think” and then send me a template rejection.
Keeping self-respect in the process
A good hiring process should leave rejected candidates disappointed, not used. I do not want to begin a working relationship by proving that I will absorb disrespect quietly. Some opportunities ask you to become smaller before you have even joined. They ask for your time, your judgment, your craft, and your hope, then call the whole thing an exercise.
In the old article, I ended with the idea that if everyone in design refused unpaid exercises, companies would have to change. I still believe that, but I believe it with more humility now. People have bills. People have families. People get scared. Sometimes they make the exception and regret it later.
So my argument is less heroic than it used to be: Say no when you can. Ask sharper questions when you are unsure. Convert real work into paid work when the scope crosses that line. If you do make the exception, at least see it clearly.
Source notes
These are the online sources used to support the piece:
- GV Library, “How to evaluate a designer with a design exercise”: Braden Kowitz describes a live, well-scoped design exercise that can take 15–40 minutes and focuses on how a designer thinks.
- International Council of Design archive of AIGA’s position on spec work: AIGA’s position says designers should be compensated fairly and should negotiate ownership or use rights; it also names risks around quality, intellectual property, and economic fairness.
- Greenhouse Candidate Experience Report 2024 PDF: 19 percent of U.S. job seekers cited time-consuming take-home assignments or tests without financial compensation among top challenges; the report also notes ghosting after take-home assignments/tests and that 24 percent of U.S. candidates used AI to answer take-home tests or complete assignments.
- Federal Reserve, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025: 63 percent of adults could cover a $400 emergency expense using cash or its equivalent; the full report notes that 30 percent could not cover three months of expenses by any means if they lost their main source of income.
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