Alex, Federica,
thank you for the phone interview and the opportunity to prove myself to TourRadar.
As a hiring manager at Greentube and a potential future hiring manager at TourRadar I am deeply concerned about your hiring practices in regards to the design exercise for the role of "Head of Design".
There are three areas I would like to cover in this essay to explain my concerns in detail:
1.	Requiring applicants to do hours of unpaid design work for your product is unethical.
2.	The nature of the exercise discriminates the pool of candidates negatively and is ineffective.
3.	This design exercise does not assess any skills that are required for the key responsibilities you listed in the job description for the "Head of Design" role.
Unpaid take-home design exercises during interviews are unethical
You are asking for many hours of expert work that are unpaid. The scope of this assignment easily takes a full working day or more to produce the best results. Any designer worth his or her salt would not simply start hammering out ideas and designs. Instead, the best designers start by asking questions and interview stakeholders so they avoid solving the wrong problems. Even if you would grant applicants access to the data to your analytics tools and user research insights, this would simply make this process longer, albeit closer to a real world design process.
The easiest solution for this issue would be to pay the market rate for the role you are trying to hire based on the assignment's scope. Another possible solution is to drop this exercise altogether and ask for the applicant to demonstrate his or her skills by walking you through a piece of his or her portfolio.
Extensive take-home exercises are discriminatory and ineffective
During our call you mentioned that you are only interested in hiring the absolute best candidates. Sadly the nature of extensive take-home exercises are discriminating the pool of your applicants negatively. People who are unable to spend large amounts of time at home due to their working schedule, living situation and possible family duties will simply not be able to do the assignment, even if they might be great designers or managers.
The best people will not offer their services for free. The best designers and managers do not need to participate in these extensive home exercises, because they have zero problems getting hired in the first place.
Instead you increase the chance of hiring someone who feels desperate to get the job, which is obviously not equal to hiring the best possible candidate.
This exercise does not match any responsibilities for the actual role
How does this exercise allow you to evaluate if I am a fit for the Head of Design role? None of the responsibilities you listed in the job description match the core of this exercise, which is to redesign a part of your live product.
Designing my best idea for your tour details page is in no way related to leading "weekly meetings and strategy sessions to coordinate the teams following business goals". You will not get any insights to my hiring practices or have the ability to assess my skills to establish a workflow and structure for a design team.
Instead of working on this design exercise, I would like to offer to run you through a case study of a portfolio piece of mine in person. This will allow you to assess my skills against fellow applicants more effectively. Additionally, you will be able to see how I think by walking you through my design process.
By the way, I do not own a Mac, so I would not be able to use your provided sketch files effectively anyway. In theory, I could import them to Figma (the design tool we are using more and more at Greentube) and work on the exercise like this. In reality I reject doing unpaid spec work out of principle, which I am hoping you will understand.
This is not just my personal opinion, but also echoed by various leaders in the design industry:
"If there’s nothing you can get from a design exercise that you can’t get from a portfolio review and a well-structured thoughtful interview, then it follows they are a waste of time." (Source)
- Peter Merholz, Author of "Org Design for Design Orgs"
" Simply put, it’s unfair to ask someone to do real work for free." (Source)
 - Daniel Burka, Director of Design at Resolve to Save Lives and Ex Design Partner at Google Ventures
" Asking a candidate to perform a design exercise so you can "see how they handle the pressure" is unethical." (Source)
 - Jared Spool, Founder of UIE and Co-founder of Center Centre
Please let me know how you would like to move forward at this stage in the hiring process.
Daniel