Submitted an application via the Spotify careers page. A recruiter then contacted me to complete a take-home applied data assignment within a week. The assignment was basically just "do something" with a pretty well known (and well worn) publicly available data set (which has nothing to do with music). After spending 8-10 hours of my life thinking of an interesting angle to pursue, doing the analysis, and writing up the results the recruiter informed me (about a week after I had submitted the assignment and only after another email from me) that they wouldn't be moving forward with my application. Due to the vagueness of the assignment I asked for some feedback about what they saw as problematic or were looking for more specifically and I got absolutely nothing. I could understand the desire to see some creativity from candidates, but this was just way too open ended and showed little effort on the part of the company to put together a professional interview process. The problems with the take-home assignment are only compounded by the fact that this is first contact: there's no preliminary call to talk about the details of the position or really suss out if there's a fit on both sides. My advice would be not to waste your time throwing darts in the dark when you can't even be sure you'd be interested in / right for the position.