> Then, another candidate filled the role...

I highly doubt that the HR went from 0 to a hire in <1 week. The hired candidate was obviously already in a more advanced stage of the interviewing process when the OP was asked to make a presentation.

So they were double disrespectful: They asked for a presentation knowing that there's a very high chance it will be meaningless. They didn't have the courtesy to sit through the presentation they asked for, or at least offer a token of their appreciation for the time the OP put to prepare for the cancelled presentation.

>I highly doubt that the HR went from 0 to a hire in <1 week. The hired candidate was obviously already in a more advanced stage of the interviewing process when the OP was asked to make a presentation.

That doesn't change anything. The company had no idea if the other candidate would pass the final interview or accept the offer until the very moment when they did, at which point they would have canceled OP's presentation. And that's what they did.

>They asked for a presentation knowing that there's a very high chance it will be meaningless.

So are you saying the better option would be for the company to say "well, there's a small chance we might hire you, but instead of giving you the opportunity we're just going to go ahead and reject you without even giving you the chance"? No, that's disrespectful.

>They didn't have the courtesy to sit through the presentation they asked for

Telling the candidate to waste their time giving the presentation that they already know won't change any outcome is disrespectful. If that had happened, we would all be here commenting about how the company is assholish for wasting OP's time by making them give a pointless presentation.

> Telling the candidate to waste their time

You seem to be arguing as if the company wasting the author's time was a hypothetical. No, they veritably, absolutely, wasted his time.

The respectful thing to do, IMO, is not to ask people to perform this type of free work, specially if the likelihood of the preparation going to waste is this high.

Thankfully, no company so far has asked me to do something like this, because I would just refuse.

They didn't waste his time. OP put in work and in return the company gave them a chance to be hired. Once it was known that there was no longer a chance for them to be hired, the company told OP to stop putting in work for it.

If the company had known from the start that there was 0% chance of hiring OP, or if the company had allowed OP to give their presentation while already knowing that there was 0% chance that OP would be hired, that would be wasting their time. But that's not what they did.

You only seem to be repeating the same two arguments with no variation, and without actually addressing what other people are saying in response to those arguments. That makes it seem to me that not only you're not actually open to discussing the matter, but also that we fundamentally disagree on what constitutes "making someone else waste time" so I guess I'll just say that I agree to disagree.

Have a good night!

Ironic, because your initial comment was just repeating the same argument that someone made before you with no variation. If you wanted a different response, you should have tried coming up with a novel thought rather than one that was already stated two comments above.

Good night.

>> The respectful thing to do, IMO, is not to ask people to perform this type of free work

Could you share the link to where someone else presented that same point? In fact, I only commented because I found it odd that nobody had said it yet in this subthread.

I addressed your "free work" comment in a separate subthread in response to your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26096991

I disagree with your statement that it was respectful.

Accepting your scenario, this suggests that they did not really want to hire the candidate and at best thought they might settle - when it came to it, they were not even willing to compare the candidate at the next stage, despite already asking them to do this work.

They strung the candidate along.

You say "strung along", I say "they were willing to give OP a chance at the job even though OP was not fully qualified for it, and when it was decided that the role was no longer available to OP, they told OP that rather than having OP waste their time giving a pointless presentation that wouldn't have changed anything".

I say "They asked OP to do a bunch of wasted work on the off-chance that their prize candidate was not available - even though they were not (under no circumstances) interested in considering the OP against the prize candidate"

There's a simple and known solution to not have to do this - which is to conduct fleets of interviews at the same time, so that you can fairly and accurately compare the candidates.