“As part of the process, we’d love you to put together a one-month social media strategy for our brand, with ten example posts and captions. Please have it back to us by Friday.”
If you’ve applied for a marketing job in the last few years, you’ve probably had an email like this. Maybe several. And maybe you’ve seen something that looked an awful lot like your ideas turn up on that company’s feed a few weeks after they said no.
I run an agency and I’ve hired plenty of marketers, so I understand why businesses want proof that someone can do the job. But the unpaid trial task has got out of hand in our industry, and it needs to stop.
A strategy is the job, not the interview
There’s a difference between testing a skill and getting work done for free. Asking someone to rewrite a caption in your brand voice in twenty minutes tests a skill. Asking for a full content plan, a competitor audit, a campaign idea and a set of finished graphics is asking for the work you’d normally pay an agency or a freelancer to do.
Marketing is especially exposed to this because ideas are the product. Once you’ve seen a good idea, you can’t unsee it. A candidate can’t take a strategy back the way they could take back a physical product, and very few of them will ever find out whether it got used.
If you’d happily use the work, you should happily pay for it.
Why do unpaid trial tasks shut good people out?
A ten-hour task doesn’t just cost the candidate ten hours. It costs them ten hours for every company that asks. Someone applying for five jobs could be doing a week of unpaid work on top of the job they already have.
The people who can manage that are the ones with spare time and no money worries. The people who can’t are often parents, carers, people working two jobs and people who are already stretched. So the big task doesn’t find the best marketer. It finds the one with the most free evenings. If you care about having a team that looks like your customers, that should worry you.
It doesn’t even tell you much
Here’s the bit businesses don’t like to hear. A strategy written from the outside, with no access to your data, your customers or your budget, is mostly guesswork. You’re judging how well someone can guess, not how well they’d do the job with the information they’d actually have on day one.
You’ll learn far more from a conversation. Ask them to talk you through a campaign they ran. What was the goal, what did they try, what went wrong and what would they do differently? Anyone can make a pretty slide. Not everyone can explain why something worked.
What does a fair task look like?
I’m not against tasks completely. A short, well-designed one can be really useful for both sides. If you’re going to set one, here’s what I think is fair:
- Keep it short. An hour or two at most, and say up front how long you expect it to take.
- Use a made-up brief. Invent a business, or use an old campaign that’s already finished. That way nobody can wonder whether you’re after free ideas.
- Only set it for your shortlist. Don’t ask fifty people to do it. Ask the final two or three.
- Pay for anything bigger. If the task genuinely needs a day, pay a fair day rate for it.
- Promise in writing you won’t use it. And mean it.
- Give proper feedback. If someone has given you their time, the least you can do is tell them how they got on.
It’s also worth knowing that the UK government’s minimum wage guidance has included a section on unpaid work trials since 2018. There’s no fixed rule, but the question it asks is whether the person is actually working. A short task to show skills is usually fine. Getting real work done for free is where you start to look like you’re on the wrong side of it.
If you’re the one being asked
You’re allowed to push back, politely. Ask how long they expect it to take and whether the work will be used. Offer to walk them through a portfolio piece instead, or to do a shorter version on a made-up brand. Put your name and “for recruitment purposes only” on everything you send. And if a company won’t budge on a huge unpaid task, that tells you a lot about how they’ll value your time once you’re through the door.
Good marketers are in demand. The businesses that treat candidates fairly will get the best of them. The ones that don’t will keep wondering why their “free strategy” never quite worked.
