My (23 f) boyfriend (24 m) is starting his first job out of college tomorrow. It's an entry level position in IT recruiting where he will be recruiting candidates for tech positions at outside companies. For context, I have been out of college/working full time for a year, and work in a corporate office as a product designer. I do enjoy a good work/life balance; my work definitely ends when I leave the office.
My bf received an email from his new job over the weekend with some onboarding tasks to complete, as well as a “homework assignment.” This consists of a “1 hour” recruitment exercise where he is supposed to find and reach out to 50 potential candidates. He just called me complaining that he is still working at 8:30pm and has been working for the past 8-9 hours on this “assignment.”
I was pretty outraged, as he is not even an official employee yet, and they have him completing job responsibilities for what is essentially a full days worth of unpaid work. It was also labor day, so we had a day trip planned together today which we had to cancel so he could sit at home and work all day.
I told him to cap the work at 1 hour as was stated in the email, and tell them he couldn't get to the rest because it took so long. He didn't, because he said he wanted to make a good impression before his first day. I get where he's coming from, but it just seems insane to hand out this much work before beginning an entry level position.
I just wanted to post this here and see what others thought about this, and the concept of a job assigning “homework.”
Context; the position is full time in-office, 5 days/week, 8:30am-5:30pm, salaried.