I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn regarding a Finance role in the company’s Netherlands office. After a short screening call I was sent a take-home assignment and a technical interview was scheduled. The assignment consisted of a 7-page document with 6 tasks and more than 25 subtasks covering a wide range of IFRS topics including journal entries, hedge accounting, loan refinancing, VAT treatment, fixed assets, interest calculations and even consolidation topics which felt unusually broad for a local accounting role. The estimated completion time was stated as 4 hours. However, the assignment required calculations, journal entries and detailed explanations of accounting treatment, which realistically required significantly more time. I spent approximately 8 hours completing it during my vacation and submitted a document of more than 20 pages with calculations, reasoning and references to accounting standards. Shortly afterwards the scheduled technical interview was cancelled and I received a rejection email stating that the work appeared to be generated by AI. This was surprising given the amount of time and effort invested. After asking for clarification, I was told the work was “overall done well”, but concerns were raised about the format (PDF instead of Excel) and layout inconsistencies, although no specific format or tools had been mentioned in the assignment instructions. Overall, the process felt inconsistent and the evaluation criteria unclear, particularly considering the size of the assignment and the time required to complete it.