Xtykutl

Do you think that this is a reasonable thing for an employer to ask

It's fair to believe they take advantage of candidates, or are extremely unprofessional. It is not reasonable to give a time-consuming assignment (presumably a week long) to start with, but is quite over the top to be delaying an answer for 3 weeks and being suggested to work more.

Do you think it would be reasonable things to ask if you were employed elsewhere, or if you were negociating other opportunities ?

is it a red flag?

It says something about the kind of management to expect. They are taking advantage of your availability and lack of experience. So it is a red flag.

Call me distrustful.
Maybe they just use the interview as a cover to get a free website, and they take advantage of the candidates to create it.
It gives me a bad feeling that a company does that.
Normally they ask you some questions to know your level not a whole project.
Maybe it's not like that but it's very suspicious

Definitely a management issue and red flags for a couple of reasons:

• after 3 weeks without notifying the candidates of any further interview or meeting on a fixed date (e.g. for a second phase interview), they still reply that "they are waiting to receive projects from other candidates and deliberate among them". Could this deliberation last a whole year? No compromise from their part was made, so who knows?


• 
  giving the opportunity "to go back and add more to the project" is just another way to say, "we saw some more cool stuff from others, so can you spend another week doing the same?"... These kind of opportunities can actually be opportunistic behaviors from recruiters to avoid hiring a person and getting part of a project done and are just a way to nitpick people with the exact same skills/abilities that likely have not the same availability to work on the same project. They are not even interested on how you work or how you handle work in a team.

If you still want to apply for that job, I would just suggest them to set a definitive day for letting you know when the actual selection interview happens before you start working on their opportunity and deliberate accordingly to their response. Best of luck, but if you do get hired, be prepared to expect further management issues and possibly overtime work.

Yes, you've been taken advantage of and they're trying to take advantage of you further. Send them an invoice for one week of work at a reasonable rate. If they balk, get a lawyer. In addition to labor issues, any subsequent use of your work will likely be copyright infringement, since they were not employing you to produce it and did not have any license or transfer of copyright from you to use it. Predatory shops like this need to be shut down.

If you want the job and have nothing else going on, why not expand on it? At least you boost your skills while working on something, right? It's better than, idk, playing minesweeper.

A task with a one week deadline - not a "one week task" - is pretty fair for a coding challenge.

Delaying the answer is different, but then we don't know the quality turned in. Normally few people do these tasks, and normally companies want to interview at least 4 people for a given role. So they're probably trying to scrape up new applicants to interview for the role themselves. This would explain the delay.

We don't know why the interviewer suggested the candidate work more on the task - maybe the interviewer is quite new and inexperienced, or maybe they figure if the candidate shows interest they can argue to just select this candidate instead of waiting to find other candidates to interview.

But sure, maybe somewhere someone is making money off the work of grad students submitting already-designed work. It is possible, but then,

• if they were doing that why did they wait weeks to request new changes?


• why did they leave it up to the OP to make the changes - a normal client wouldn't say "oh, it needs more... um, sparkle! Just add random things please".

I think this is just a case of a bad candidate pipeline and a low turnout of candidates submitting work, and the company being unsure how to proceed.

It seems they are genuinely trying to keep you interested while waiting for the screening process for other candidates to finish and this is not a red flag. No company is going to benefit from how a grad student designs a website with pictures as there are literally thousands of free templates and content management systems out there and they could have chosen any.

I would like to supplement this with an anecdote where I helped a friend with a very similar screening work that involved XSLT and a picture gallery and she ended up working at a company in Seattle for a few years afterwards, so this sort of thing certainly happens and positive outcomes are plausible.

If instead they asked you to make a business process management system that was tailored for their workflow, I would say that is a weird flag if not a red one.

I am a senior web developer and we do something very similar at my workplace. It is important to note that the assignment being given is not turned into a revenue project for the potential employer, but they are simply looking for an example of what the candidates can do. This industry has a large number of people that say they can perform and have excellent code samples, but when brought in cannot perform some of the basic duties.

My guess is they like you as a candidate, but you underwhelmed them with the given task. We encounter this situation often. Add some real punch to the project and send the new version out.

I would refrain from condemning the company. My company is a very excellent place to work and highly value their employees, which is why they work so hard to make sure they choose the right one. If you aren't comfortable with the assignment simply decline and move on.

It's important to take a step back and ask yourself how much is this possibility of getting a new job worth to you?

If you are currently employed and open to the idea of working for
another company but aren't dead set on changing jobs, perhaps it's not
worth your time to do a week long project.

If you're unemployed and/or absolutely want/need to work for this
company, then it probably is worth your time to complete the week long
project.

Evaluate your time spent and your desire/need to get this job and make a decision based on that.