Not many companies will use interviews to steal ideas. But you don’t really know who they are until you meet them. I love your attitude. While it stings to be used without being paid, the bigger picture is that you know who the bad guys are. Word gets around. There’s nothing like a company’s professional community to sink its reputation when it does something stupid. Thanks for posting the story.

The company I was interviewing with wanted me to tell them how I’d solve a particular problem they were having. (Not a problem they’ve had in the past, where my solution could be compared to the one my would-be predecessor came up with, but one that any casual perusal of their web site could tell you was still very much a live issue for them.) I gave my answer in terms that amounted to “I can’t tell for sure where the problem lies without access to your servers and routers, which obviously you won’t give me until I’m hired, but my best guess is that it’s either X or Y, and of those two I’d investigate X first, and if it’s X then I’d do Z to fix it. If it’s Y then the real underlying problem could be a number of things, and I’d look into W, Q, and F to find out which way is the best way to proceed…but I’d still do Z anyway, because even if X isn’t your problem right now, it’s going to bite you down the road for sure if you’re not prepared.”

This was, I thought, enough information to convey to anyone competent to evaluate system administrators that I was qualified for the position in question, and since the bit about “I can’t tell for sure without access to your network” was the truth, it was also as helpful in their problem as I could possibly have been at that stage of the process.

A day and a half after I told them this, the very public and visible problem I’d attempted to diagnose disappeared, and I never heard from them again.

This is as close to the original writer’s model of “exploitation” as I believe is plausible in an interview situation. And while I think it’s (in some cosmic sense) unfair that they’d use my insight, proffered in the context of a job interview, and then not even proceed to the next stage of the interview process (let alone actually hire me or pay for my effort), the actual loss to me was zero, because the “work” I did for them cost me no money, and no time for which I had a more productive use. And the lesson I learned (that this is a company which does not truly value the contributions of IT professionals, or their time) may have saved me considerable heartache. I would undoubtedly have been MISERABLE working there, if they’d offered me a job.

So my advice is, if you are exploited in this way (and you may be), count it as a cheap learning experience. No business can subsist on exploitation of this particular variety, since they’ll never be able to go back to the same person twice, as they would with an employee. Any business which would exploit a candidate in this manner will surely exploit their employees far more destructively, and the candidate is better off for having been warned away at low cost to himself. Meanwhile, firms that offer candidates the chance to prove themselves this way (oh, how I wish there were more of them!) seem to me far more likely to treat those people’s skills with deserved respect once they become employees.

The most recent one was less than 15 minutes of “which project were you on and how did it go?” and ended with “let me get back to you”. An hour later came the phone call .. “We need you in XYZ City, how soon can you get there?”

At some point we all have to make a choice as to our willingness to trust. Even though like all of us I have been burned from time to time, I still remain convinced that when it comes to employers the vast majority would not take advantage of someone who “showed them how they would solve their problem.” Indeed, I would side with Nick and others who would argue that they would want that person on board ASAP.

After all, they wouldn’t be looking if they knew how to fix it themselves.

What you need to do is extend the idea of doing a little of the job in the interview to doing the job without being paid for it but in a way that’s professional and provable.

If you want to get into marketing, for example, think of a local organization that needs a marketing campaign, develop it, propose it, carry it out, and then put it on your resume with the name of the organization. It could be a local charity, or your brother-in-law’s restaurant, or an open-source web application, or whatever as long as it’s somewhere that’s a real organization that will trust you to do the work for them. When the project is done, you have experience in the field.

This doesn’t work so well if you want to become, say, a financial analyst because no one will trust an outsider with their data so in that case think of the skillset you need. Can you prove you’re an ace at Excel? If you teach a course on it at a community college or run an Excel advice column on the web, those are things that you can put on your resume and talk about in interviews to prove your expertise.

And if you’re a web developer you would have a web site for yourself or some organization that demonstrates your skill at developing whatever type of web site functionality you specialize in.

For some types of work this is a fine idea. In general though, when you are one of a handful on a team, it isn’t that easy to break off a bite-size chunk of work. On the other hand, one could give me various problem situations and see what I’d do and that I have seen in interviews, the “What would you do here?” kinds of questions that can be good if there is enough give and take on them. I don’t like being asked 101 questions and little follow-up happening to tell me if I’m killing myself in the interview or not.