The job market is a soul-sucking meat grinder right now. Countless hours wasted scrolling through listings for jobs that don’t even really exist, tailoring résumés and rewriting cover letters, uploading résumés into portals built by someone who I swear has never tested their own product, repeating the same info that’s already in your résumé, only to get chewed up and spat out by auto-reject AI. And all while you know there are at least a hundred other qualified people clawing at the same sad scraps.
And when you do finally find a role that seems halfway decent, there’s always some shifty hiring practice going on. It’s demoralizing. I hate this for all of us.
Here’s a recent example of a job post I found on LinkedIn:
On the surface it looks normal, right? Remote copywriter role, long list of responsibilities, nothing out of the ordinary. But there’s no salary posted. Asking people to apply blind is already screaming, “We don’t value your work.”
They want proven experience, platform fluency, testing skills, collaboration chops, and they don’t even bother to say what they’ll pay. That’s a whole lot of demand for zero commitment in return. And we’ve become immune to it, totally accepting that a lack of pay transparency is ok. It isn’t.
Once you get into applying for the role, they ask:
And yup, I did answer their questions that way.
This is no different from walking into a mechanic shop and saying, “Fix my engine as a trial.”
Or telling a contractor, “Build a deck in my yard so I know you can manage finishing my basement.”
Or asking a graphic designer to provide a logo for your business before you hire them to develop other creative.
No one calls that stuff an assessment. It’s unpaid labour, period.
Portfolios and references exist for this exact reason. You can see the work, the style, and you’re welcome to ask about the results. If that’s not enough for you, that’s a you problem.
So of course I completed their assignment. Because what better to do with all this rage than uncork it?
Writers, designers, strategists… we don’t owe anyone unpaid labour. Our time is worth something.
Stop giving it away to people who’ve shown you exactly how little they value it.
I’ve got the matches; who’s ready to burn it all down?