Is Clipboard Health engaging in unethical behavior?

I don't really have a view on the ethics of it. I don't think anyone should apply to any company that doesn't respect your time during the interview process. Other than resume / cover letter preparation (which parallels writing the job ad), I think the rest of a job application process should be reciprocal with the company putting equal time into it as the applicant. The idea of making someone do a bunch of work when a company has no skin in the game is offensive. Another one I've seen is recorded interviews where a candidate is asked to answer some questions into a webcam because the hiring org can't be bothered to actually talk to them.

Looking at the recent reviews of job interviews for Clipboard Health (YC W17) on Glassdoor, most of them seem to fit a common pattern:

> 1) CH seems to ask the job applicant to complete a lengthy take-home project, in many cases before even having a basic phone call with them. In most cases, it seems to be a very heavily detailed case study or project that goes far beyond what most would consider a reasonable amount of work for an initial stage job application for a non high-level executive job. In some cases, these seem to have possible direct business application for the case study or project, such as a detailed analysis of how to analyze certain metrics to increase sales.

> 2) CH then basically ghosts the job applicant and perhaps gives a generic type of "you were not selected" form letter in response to many hours or even days of effort by the job applicant, without even a drop of feedback.

At best, this seems to be deliberately disrespectful of many job applicants' time. At worst, there might be a potential for an extremely unethical harvesting of free job applicants' labor for Clipboard Health's own business benefit.

Of course with any job interview reviews you can expect some over the top negative feedback by upset people, so you can't look at any individual review and completely believe that their experience is completely true. But when you see dozens of interviews following this pattern, you start to wonder what's going on there.

Now, with such a series of bad reviews, you might ask why is their overall interview experience score only 51% negative? That seems unusually low for a company which claims to have a great culture (most MANGAF companies are in the 15-20% negative interview range as a contrast), but not catastrophically bad.

Looking at it, there seem to be clumps of positive interviews, with very weird English phrasing, and that do not seem to all be genuine. Sorting in order by most recent, and looking around January 13-14, 2023 is particularly interesting. Are these fake positive reviews from somebody? Certain phrases seem unusually weird and are repeated. Glassdoor does seem to manually check reviews for doxing behavior, but I wonder how good their automated "spam" detection systems are? Probably not so good, just based on this.

Now, I'm not making any accusations of illegal behavior or anything, heavens to betsy! But I wonder what a really good analysis of some of this review data might reveal about both the positive and negative reviews. If any journalists want to do some actual investigative journalism, there might be something unusual going on with this company.