The example project is a redesign for a single web page. With a month to let ideas percolate, that's likely to be less than 15 hours of work for a person who has made it through portfolio and resume review for a position designing web pages on the employer side and who is still interested in the job after several rounds of interviews on the employee side. To me that seems more pleasant than a couple of days in the airport and hotels to travel cattle class.
My take is that if it selects against candidates who view remote employment as just another free lance job, more the better for both sides. Remote employment is not another form of freelance work. The relationship is different.
> My take is that if it selects against candidates who view remote employment as just another free lance job, more the better for both sides. Remote employment is not another form of freelance work. The relationship is different.
I'm not really sure how you've made that leap. It doesn't seem to me that hiring people for a freelance job selects for people who don't think of remote work as a freelance job. If anything you're selecting for people able to make that commitment.
The company's goal is not contracting with free lancers. It is hiring remote employees. I suspect the natural inclination of many people would be to treat the sample work project as free lance work because that's the short term form. The long term form is not free lance work. It is remote employment.
If the company is guarding against false positives in hiring, then what they are looking for is people who are able to reframe the short term form in terms of the long term form. That is people who treat the trial as trial employment rather than as strictly a free lance proposition because people who have made that transition are a safer bet than people who at the end of a month are still thinking like free lancers.
Putting on a suit and tie for two days of travel and job interviews is just as much a mock business situation as a trial project. It's just likely to be less informative to both parties. And it's still selecting for commitment to the hiring process.
My take is that if it selects against candidates who view remote employment as just another free lance job, more the better for both sides. Remote employment is not another form of freelance work. The relationship is different.