TV execs need to have ideas pitched at them by creative freelancers. They also need to know that a director can take one of those ideas and develop it in a creative way before they take the risk of hiring them. These have always been grey areas ripe for exploitation.
But the current famine of work is causing some companies to go many steps further.
Imagine that I’m such an exec, advertising a job. To apply for the role, I’ll need you to:
• Complete an initial application via a web-form.
• Take an online exam – some generic (and slightly ridiculous) multiple-choice questions with a warning that “we have ways of knowing if you have taken the time to google an answer.”
• Provide an automated video interview that is completely one-way.
• Provide a separate webcam video of yourself answering a different series of questions (with an option to re-do your answers within a wider time limit).
At some point, you might even be offered a phone interview with an actual human being.
But we won’t stop there. Next up, there’s a test where you have to perform a highly specific task which involves downloading huge amounts of footage, with an expectation that – within one week – you’ll have written an intro script, edited the footage into a video show of a defined length, and written other scripts that would need to be filmed to insert into the edited show.
And – crucially – you’ll also give me a list of suggestions for the future of my show.
Maybe then you’ll get the job, but if you don’t, you’ll probably get an extremely impersonal rejection email, with little to no information about why you weren’t successful.
Well, you don’t have to “imagine” any of that, because it’s all absolutely real.
Everything I’ve listed above has been reported to me by directors, applying for shows that you will probably have heard of.
All in all, this amounts to many long days of work, all of which are done without any prior face-to-face meeting where the prospective directors can get a feel for the team and the culture. Where there is communication with any humans, it’s usually highly one-sided and demanding. Any request to vary the tasks set, or any failure to comply with the interviewer's requests, results in elimination from the process.
To add insult to injury, in some cases, directors suspect that parts of their application are assessed using AI, and many of the replies may even have been generated by AI.
Now of course, I’m not suggesting we go back to informal hires, where mates call up mates and all that matters is who you know. It’s right that there are thorough processes that make hiring open and fair.
But there’s a line, and it’s being crossed with regularity.
Because there are a lot of people out of work, these processes end up being a very mechanistic filter to waste the time of hundreds of experienced directors. That means hundreds of unpaid days from directors who could have spent their time more usefully. A recent survey commissioned by Directors UK backs this up, showing that “32% of directors undertake non-paid creative work such as developing new ideas or writing scripts, showing that a significant part of their working time is dedicated to invisible, unpaid labour.”
These processes also make applicants vulnerable to another kind of exploitation: pitch harvesting. Some of the experiences I’ve heard about sound like exercises designed to wring the maximum amount of content from a freelancer, for the smallest amount of input from the company. Everywhere, directors replying to pitches like this have no way of knowing if, or how far, their ideas have been harvested. Challenging any potential abuses here is hampered by the fact that, before being allowed to even participate in this pitch, directors are required to sign non-disclosure agreements.
Is this the future of directing in the factual space? I would like to think that the engagers and organisations such as Directors UK could get around a table and establish a set of rules and norms for pitches like this.
Directors UK sits with Pact and the major commissioners on the Directors and Producers’ Forum which meets a few times a year and we will hope to raise this issue there, but in the meantime, many shows are in danger of teaching potential applicants not to bother in the first place.
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