First was with hiring manager to understand about employee. Once passed, next interview is with HR. After that there was a Take Home Assessment. Objective of the assessment was to see how well the prospective employee was able to manage (& navigate) around the Cloudflare platform.
If the assessment was not deemed to be a Pass/Fail and instead used to be interviewed with the next interviewer(s), then it would have reached its objective. Instead, the assessment totally deviated from the main objective.
The individual had to set up his/her own lab enviroment and integrate with the Cloudflare platform. I'm not sure the relevance of this. Organisations should already provide a lab enviroment for their employees for work purposes (e.g., customer demonstrations, troubleshooting, etc.) and not getting the employee(s) to set up their own lab as the employee(s) may keep confidential information to themselves.
Furthermore, having not hired yet, the individual also has to spend money to obtain its own FQDN and SSL Certificate. Both are not provided and non-claimable.
A report was also required on understanding the customers' viewpoints. That sounds more like getting feedback on whether the product is good and getting information to improve on it. At a point, it did felt it was making use of the interview.
If the individual doesn't go through these assessment, that's great. If the individual has already been accepted to go through the next round(s) of interview prior before the assessment, that's great too. If not, this assessment is really uncalled for.
