I was interviewing for an email production position. I have over five years experience coding, building and deploying emails. The job looked like a perfect fit. The first step was a phone interview, which went very well. Then they asked me to come into their office where I would be meeting with two people and then take a skills test. (html). I asked the HR rep several times what the test would consist of exactly so I could be prepared. She didn't know. When I arrived at the interview things were going very well. It seemed like a perfect fit. Then came the skills test. They asked me to replicate a jpg and code a page completely from scratch AND from memory. I had to do this on a blank notepad file. No resources, no templates - Nada. Now like I've mentioned. I have been coding emails for five years but this was ridiculous. I know html very well but I DON"T HAVE IT MEMORIZED. Anyone who could code like that would not be an email marketer, they would be building websites. To be sure I asked several colleagues if they could have done this and they all agreed they couldn't. The one colleague who could was a java script developer and he thought it was ridiculous to expect an email coder to do this. Even still I was able to replicate the jpg somewhat but could not refine it because - well I don't have code memorized. A few days later I got an email from the hiring manager telling me that I didn't get the job because I blew the test. Anyone they hired would either 1) be an excellent coder but have no knowledge of email marketing 2) quickly get bored because - well coding emails is just not that exciting. Sure enough a few months later the job was posted again AND i was getting phone calls from head hunters about the position. I guess that "ace coder" that they hired didn't work out. Aside from this - they were very nice and cordial. I just thought it was very rude to put me on the spot like that with no warning. They could have sent me the jpg in advance and said "you will have to code this from memory" then I would have been prepared.