The way a company signals their respect for my time is by either compensating me for the time I spent on them instead of literally anything else, or by demonstrating that they are spending an equivalent amount of time on me rather than anything else.
If I am doing a project that takes me 8 hours, that company should either be writing me a check (for somewhere between $100 and $500, probably) or planning the mother of all individual sales pitches to convince me to not just work there, but also to go the entire distance through their interview process.
No company has ever done this for me. Every last one of them has expected the candidates to spend as much of their own time (and even money) as necessary. Several (all of them in Denver, possibly by coincidence) have even reneged on paying travel expenses. Tyler Tech in Lakewood, CO, tried to get out of paying for my hotel room, declined to spring for a rental car, and remains to this day the most hostile interview I have ever suffered through.
