Applied for a role and was asked to complete a quirky assignment (drawing an octopus fighting a pirate). After submitting, I received a rejection email stating: “It was a pleasure speaking with you about the [role]. It’s always awesome learning more about a person and their professional experience. Your octopus fighting pirate art will forever be memorialized in our archives.” The issue is, I never had a conversation with anyone at the company. This kind of templated messaging suggests a lack of attention to candidate experience and raises questions about how organized or authentic the hiring process really is. If a company positions itself as thoughtful and people-focused, basic alignment between communication and reality seems like a reasonable expectation. Asking candidates to invest time in creative tasks is fine, but it makes the follow-through matter even more. Without that, the process feels less like a genuine evaluation and more like a checkbox exercise.