Summer 2025. I applied to a LinkedIn posting for a videomaker role with a political party in Italy (I won’t name them). A few days later, HR emailed me to say I’d made it to the next stage and sent over the brief for a practical test, due in a few days. The brief wasn’t trivial. Full transcription of two videos, two vertical reels edited from institutional footage, subtitles in a specific font, Canva graphics with newspaper headlines for overlays, and a horizontal video mask with top and bottom bands to design from scratch. Real work, done in Premiere, CapCut and Canva. Not a homework assignment, finished, publish-ready material. I delivered everything on time, in a shared Drive folder. I even threw in a second variant for one of the reels, just to show two different approaches. Early September, after a few weeks of silence, I sent a polite follow-up asking whether the process was still open. No reply. I waited. In December I wrote again, asking simply for an explanation: technical glitch, change of plans, selection closed early, anything. I made it clear that a “no” was perfectly fine, as long as someone actually said it. Nothing.

Here’s where it gets interesting, and bear with me on the technical bit because I think it matters. I checked the activity panel on the Drive folder: no access from the party’s HR account, no access from any related account. The handful of opens registered in analytics are all me, going back to check (fewer than 5 in total). Someone could point out that there are ways to open a Drive file without leaving a trace, open link, not logged in, but it makes very little sense for an HR office, the same one that reached out to me in the first place, to review a candidate in incognito mode (am I wrong thinking of it?) The most reasonable conclusion is that nobody ever opened those files except me. What gets me isn’t the rejection. Rejection is part of the deal, part of the jungle. It’s that the work doesn’t seem to have been looked at, that hours of actual work went into producing material that served no one, and that two emails to an HR office, the same one that originally contacted me, went ignored for months. That’s a level of carelessness I can’t write off as a simple oversight. Has anyone here ever delivered a practical test of this scope to an institutional or political organisation and just watched it disappear? I’m trying to figure out whether this is standard practice in politics or whether I’ve just hit an unlucky case. Second question: what’s your rule of thumb for accepting unpaid tests? I’ll admit I didn’t really have one, and this whole thing has made me rethink my approach from scratch.

I’m not naming the party because the point isn’t political, it’s about process. I’ve obviously kept everything: emails, original brief, Drive logs, follow-ups.