What can I do if a company stole my work from a take-home interview assignment?

Job-Genie recognises this as a known hiring-process risk, not a Job-Genie platform issue. If a company has used your take-home work without hiring you, your options include documenting evidence, issuing a formal written objection, reporting to relevant professional bodies, and seeking legal advice — particularly around intellectual property ownership.

What Actually Happened

Take-home assignments are increasingly used to extract free strategic or creative work under the guise of candidate evaluation. This is distinct from a legitimate skills test. If the output was specific, proprietary, and directly usable — and you can demonstrate it was used — you may have grounds for an intellectual property claim.

Immediate Steps to Take

1. Document everything. Save the brief, your submission, timestamps, and any evidence of the company using your work (published content, product changes, presentations).
2. Send a formal written objection. Email the hiring contact and copy HR, stating clearly that the work remains your intellectual property.
3. Consult an IP or employment solicitor. In many jurisdictions, work created outside an employment contract belongs to the creator by default.
4. Report the company. Relevant industry bodies, Glassdoor reviews, and LinkedIn posts can create accountability and warn other candidates.
5. Contact a journalist or industry community. Patterns of this behaviour are newsworthy and community-reported cases have led to public accountability.

How Job-Genie Relates to This

Job-Genie's core focus is reducing Application Silence and closing the Recruiter-Fit Gap — helping candidates reach the hidden job market through specialist recruiters rather than direct applications to companies that may never have been hiring in good faith. Ghost jobs and exploitative screening processes are symptoms of a broken direct-application system.

By routing candidates toward genuine recruiter-led opportunities — using the Truth Layer rewrite and the Recruiter-Ready Brief — Job-Genie reduces exposure to the kind of unaccountable hiring practices that create situations like this.

Bottom Line

This is a legal and ethical matter that sits outside any CV or application platform. Seek professional advice promptly. Preserve all evidence before it disappears.