Take-Home Assignments: What's Reasonable and What's a Red Flag
A candidate wrote to me recently describing a take-home assignment for a mid-level marketing role: build a full quarterly campaign plan, complete with budget allocation, channel strategy, and creative briefs, due in 72 hours, unpaid, with no guarantee of even a phone screen afterward. That's not a skills assessment. That's free consulting work disguised as a hiring step, and it's worth knowing the difference before you sink a weekend into it.
The Time Test
A reasonable take-home for most individual-contributor roles takes somewhere between one and three hours. If a prompt is vague enough that finishing it "properly" would take eight or more hours, that's a signal, not a coincidence. Read the assignment brief literally: does it ask you to solve a real, specific business problem the company is likely facing right now, using proprietary-sounding detail? That's the clearest red flag of all -- a pattern of hiring managers using "interview assignments" to crowdsource actual strategy work from a batch of candidates who'll never be hired.
Before starting, time-box it deliberately. Decide in advance how long you're willing to spend, and stop at that limit even if the deliverable feels incomplete. A candidate who submits a focused, clearly-scoped 2-hour effort with a note explaining the time-box looks more senior, not less, than one who disappears for a week and returns with a 40-slide deck.
How to Push Back Without Looking Difficult
You can ask questions about scope before you start, and you should. A short, professional email works well: "I want to make sure I'm scoping this appropriately -- roughly how much time should I plan to spend, and is there a particular section you'd like me to prioritize?" This does two things: it gets you a real time expectation to hold the company to, and it signals that you scope work before diving in, which is itself a skill many roles are trying to assess. If a recruiter's answer is evasive ("just do your best!") when you ask for a time estimate, that vagueness is itself useful information about how the team operates.
If the ask is clearly disproportionate -- unpaid work exceeding four or five hours for anything but a senior strategy role -- it's reasonable to say so directly: "I'd be glad to complete a scoped exercise closer to two hours; happy to discuss compensating for anything beyond that." Companies serious about respecting your time will adjust the ask. Companies that push back hard on a reasonable boundary are showing you, before you've even joined, how they'll treat your time as an employee.
Delivering Work That Respects Your Own Time
Resist the urge to over-deliver as a way of proving enthusiasm. A tightly scoped, clearly reasoned submission with explicit assumptions stated up front ("I assumed a $50k monthly budget since none was given; happy to adjust") reads as more competent than an exhaustive one, because it shows judgment about what matters, not just effort. Include a short cover note stating how long you spent -- this normalizes time-boxing for future candidates too, even if it feels like an odd thing to disclose.
Reading the Feedback (or Its Absence)
After submitting, notice what happens next. A team that gives you specific, substantive feedback on your work -- even critical feedback -- is treating the exercise as a genuine two-way evaluation. A team that goes silent for weeks, or moves straight to a generic rejection with no reference to your actual submission, was likely never planning to engage with the specifics of what you built. Either way, you'll have learned something real about how the company operates before accepting an offer from them -- which is, in a strange way, the actual point of the exercise.