My apologies btw, particularly Mgosia has already extensively answered the question (as have others). For some reason only the first couple of comments were displayed before I started writing, not sure why.
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| A little off-topic here, but I was wondering if the following is legal or not.
A few months ago, I had an interview with one of the two big banks. It was for a rather technical/quant position, so before even going to the first interview, I was given a week to answer to some pretty mathematical / programming questions. It was not an easy or straightforward task, it took me about 30 hours to do this, as it involved writing code, collecting and cleaning data, doing post-processing and analysis, and finally writing a 35 page report in LaTeX.
After this, I was invited for three rounds of 1.5 hour interviews on three different days (the first one with the hiring manager, the second one with the managing director and the third one with the HR director).
All in all, I spent about 30 hours for the technical report, another 10 hours for the interview preparations and on top of that, I had to take 3 days of holidays from work to go to the interviews (as if they could not just put everything in one day).
In the end, I did not get the job, and the worst thing is that I never got a reply to my e-mail from either the Hiring Manager or the HR department.
Where does the law stand on this? Is it legal to ask a potential employee to dedicate so much work and effort on something like this, take so many days of holidays and then not compensate him?
P.S. Nothing was agreed upfront regarding a payment, but the process was not also clear from the beginning, nobody informed me that there would be 3 interviews, 2 to 3 weeks apart. | |
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Jesus Christ. The gall some people have is unbelievable.
So for the work you did - to me that is roughly the same as a Probetag. It seems to have been actual work rather than some testing. I've had to sit through a lot of testing in job interviews, but aptitude and psychometric stuff. I was once asked to prepare a brief presentation on a topic, but that was maybe a couple of hours worth of work plus some personal prep and was more about presentation skills than content. Stuff like that I guess is ok.
But to actually submit a piece of work that took 30 hours to complete, not get reimbursed for it, and then not even have the decency to respond is neither here nor there.
Clearly this is grey zone - where does work start? But I don't think I would let this one go without at least trying to get reimbursement. There are hotlines where you can get free legal help as well as walk-in hours, I would go there first (Zurich:
https://www.zav.ch/fuer-rechtssuchen...tsstellen.html)
Btw - theoretically you don't need to take vacation days for interviews, even if you're still fully employed. Problem of course is that no one goes to their employer before having resigned to ask for time off for an interview. But on the off chance you are working out your notice period, you are allowed to go for interviews, independent of whether you were terminated or whether you resigned yourself.
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