Hi Vaipan, thanks for writing this. As someone who's applied for (many) dozens of EA and non-EA jobs over the past 2 years, I can identify and empathise with your story here.
From my experience, I think EA orgs do use 'work tests' way more often than non-EA orgs (I very rarely had to do a work test for non-EA job hiring, only interviews). There are obviously pros and cons to using work tests, and in my short time at a couple of different EA orgs, I've been part of pretty frequent discussion about how/when/why we should use work tests in hiring rounds (to their credit, I think).
The main thing that I'm surprised by in your post is the high frequency that you report to have done unpaid work tests. In recent times I've been really happy to see most EA orgs offering compensation for work tests, and I think the vast majority of work tests that I did were compensated.
"but it feels that organizations use my work without them having the intention to hire me. "
^This quote is pretty concerning .In general, I don't think I've seen anyone use the product of work tests for anything other than assessing them for hiring purposes. Are you saying that orgs have used the product of your work tests for other purposes? In that case, it does seem especially bad for that work test to have been uncompensated, and I'd assume (and hope) that most other EA's would agree with me.
I'm really sorry you had such negative experiences with your applications.
I'd like to state for the record that Rethink Priorities makes heavy use of work tests because we find they best correlate with on-the-job performance.
However, we:
(1) always ensure generous and competitive compensation for work tests done regardless of whether the applicant moves on in the process
and (2) never make actual use of work test output other than to assess the applicant (e.g., we only ask questions that we've already researched internally)
While I'm sympathetic to organizations who may not have the funding, I think it would make sense in the future for candidates to refuse to engage with multi-hour work trials without fair compensation.
Same for the organization I run.