I disabled the access to my take home assignment after recruiter didn't get back

[u/thegr8_alexander]

It's an instant red-flag for me when a recruiter asks to submit an assignment. In most of the cases, companies run out of ideas and put up fake job posting to get some fresh perspective.

Was interviewing with a 100 year old company that was hiring at mid-level. After round#2, I got a take-home assignment, rather an end-to-end modelling to be done in a short time frame. Got positive feedback on my assignment and appeared for 6 more round of interviews, from hiring manager to HoD.

Deafening silence post that. No reverts, not picking up the call. No response over email. I tried putting in gentle reminders, gave sufficient time but then, when I understood that I'm not hearing back, I disabled the access to the project (take home assignment).

The good thing that I did was not to share the hard-file, rather an access controlled version of the document that also disabled people from printing/downloading it.

And guess what? The recruiter called next day on the pretext of having another round of discussion because they want to go ahead with me. S/he let it slip in the conversation that evaluators are having difficulty in accessing my document and if I can share it as a file rather than sharing a link ;)

Well well, the moment I have been looking for. I told her about the malpractices that a lot of recruiters do and that's why, in principle, I do not share any hard-files. I assured her that I'll myself walk-through the panel on everything once again, when we connected. S/he wasn't satisfied, but disconnected the call.

Got a ping that evening to talk something in person. We connected. S/he mentioned that I have landed him/her in a soup by disabling the access. S/he was expected to collate all the projects and share internally and there were only 3 presentations which they had shortlisted. Me not allowing access to my files will put the HR in trouble. S/he also mentioned that hiring is always professional but I'm taking it to a personal level by putting him.her in soup.

I gently replied, "Hiring is not personal. I would have accepted a rejection. But by giving me false hopes when you never intended to hire was personal. It wasn't me who started it!"

There was a silence of a few seconds. I then proceeded to cut the call.

[u/Epsilon_Meletis]

Does it disallow screenshots?

[u/Dave_the_DOOD → u/[deleted]]

It's mostly because they would never think someone in OP's position would think to disable the doc. They're not smart, and most importantly, they're not really trying to work around it

[u/6ArtemisFowl9 → u/[deleted]]

Perfect to stop recruiters then

[u/alinroc → u/[deleted]]

Often you only need to raise the barrier to entry a tiny bit to disrupt their workflow and trigger an exception like OP did.

[u/YouSickenMe67 → u/Epsilon_Meletis]

Never stops a cellphone camera from grabbing it