I had a job interview with a company recently and one of the negative feedback I got was that I hadn’t tried out their product. Now this might be a valid concern if they had any sort of free trial for it, but the lessons they offer start at 60€ and I didn’t feel comfortable spending that amount just to get a better chance at an interview. They also offered no free credits or anything like that during the interview. I did understand how the product worked by researching it online.
I definitely feel that there’s something wrong in asking for an interviewee to spend money on the product they are interviewing for. For one it’s a great setup for a scam. But is there any regulation that should prevent companies from doing this? I am based in the EU and was interviewing for a Spanish company.
UPDATE: This is definitely not a scam, the company is fairly known. This is more of a question of is it right/legal to expect this?
This definitely sounds like they’re trying to trick you into some MLM type scam. Stay far away for sure.
As for legal… I imagine they can ask if you’ve used the product, but it certainly FEELS like something questionable in this particular situation.
Name the fucking company
I do see some cases where “experience using our product is a plus”, but the way it was told you as a “negative feedback” I feel is wrong.
They probably don’t want to spend time training a new employee on their product, which to me is a huge red flag. You dodged a bullet there.
My country (Brazil) doesn’t have any regulations about it. Don’t know about the EU.
Familiarity with the product is often just a baseline for jobs like sales, especially if they have high turnover.
It’s not a great sign about the work environment, so you may have dodged a bullet.
I don’t know about your field, but that does seem somewhat suspicious to me. I suppose it depends on which company, which product, and which field.
For instance, I could presumably see an argument for turning down a salesperson applicant to Microsoft for not having used Microsoft Office before. ie, if not using a given product demonstrates lack of experience in the field.
Is the product well-known or a standard in the field?
I’ve updated the description to mention that this is definitely not a scam, more like weird and unreasonable behavior.
Honestly, be grateful you even received notice you didn’t make it past the interview. Most jobs just leave you on read so to speak.
If its worded the way you’ve worded it, then I don’t think it is illegal in most countries. That said, if the details could be phrased dramatically, a 60 second news story calling it a fishy practice, might make it illegal… which it should be
In Australia, this would be fine if the position description clearly states required experience. But even then, you better believe the right people are getting hired with some weeks or months for training time if they initially lack ithat experience.
Honestly, sounds like you just dodged a bullet big time. They’re reactive hiring—probably from bad culture resulting in high turnover rates—but are banking on their size and brand being attractive.
I know from first-hand experience that Apple does this, for example. However they get away with it in Australia by heavily utilising employment agencies as a buffer, and then competency tests to filter prior to joining and training. One of the groups in my workforce planning folio peaked at 62% annualised attrition, but it kept performing by acquiring talent that way. Absolutely miserable culture, but fresh meat kept lining up with sparkles in their eyes.
Don’t fall for it.
There are certainly commercial (enterprise) software suites that many jobs would expect you to have familiarity with. If you were applying for a job with Atlassian then yeah I’d expect you to have familiarity with JIRA at least. There are lots of instances of businesses expecting you to have experience with specific not-free software, but it mostly falls under the category of work experience.
JIRA is free for individuals though so not the best example
Except that everybody and their grandma is using Jira, and not having any experience with it is unusual (well, maybe not for an entry position).
Oh like SAP. It’s a requirement to know how to program their ERP/CRM systems, or they proprietary database system, or their online e-commerce platform. All of which the software and documentation are unavailable to the public and certifications cost thousands of dollars.
You basically can’t apply unless you previously worked at a company that used said product, but then that company requires the same experience for their jobs. So…
Not exactly to your question, but a company I used to work for would ask for experience in internal only tools on job reqs.
Sure, hopefully it’s for people making role changes internally, but it seems a bit weird to ask for experience in <custom internal tool it is literally impossible to see, use, or hear about without working there> for an entry level job.
Legally it’s OK, having no experience in some specific product is not a protected class.
Morally no, if the research wasn’t enough and they expect you to have paid for their product already, thats just weird. Just pass and move on.
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It sounds like the interviewer has unrealistic expectations. Which isn’t surprising: they put a fair amount of their life into the product, and (to them) the hiring process is taking dozens of hours. So, if they have no empathy, I can see how they would want that.
It’s unrealistic to expect candidates to invest significant time and money into a job they are statistically unlikely to get.
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Yes, I can see cases where this might be valid. For example, if you wanted to be some kind of SAP administrator / programmer (a paid-only enterprise management software), nobody would hire you for such a role without having some experience with that product. Same for something like Salesforce.
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nope. not unless they give you a freebie. Main example I can think of companies having this requiremnet are mlms.
