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?
Name the fucking company
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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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.
I’ve seen a lot of fashion sales jobs be really picky. If you don’t own any of the clothes from a particular brand. If you want a job selling, say, Louis Vuitton, they expect you to come and dress in those sorts of clothes.
But having purchased a particular product? Or a service? Typically that sort of thing is something you would be trained on after you get hired. Familiarity with the product? Yes. Necessarily owning it? No.
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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I don’t know if there’s any legal implications, but morally it’s pretty abhorrent. The question I’d be asking is would you even want to work for a company that engages in that type of tactic, especially since they’re likely to repeat that kind of nonsense after you’ve started the job.
I mean if it was after I started the job that would make sense. You have to know the product you’re working on.
But it seems like a power asymmetry that they have dedicated 1 hour of their time to the interview and I am expected to spend money and more research time, in addition to all the usual interview preparation.
It sounds somewhat reasonable and you just are not the candidate. From what it sounds like, it would be like applying for a job as a pool lifeguard but your only experience around pools was from YouTube. They want someone who has handled that item before not someone who says “let me take a crack at it”
A lifeguard needs training/certification to do their job, so you wouldn’t just hire anybody.
In OPs case, they are qualified to do the job but the recruiter didn’t like that they hadn’t used their product. That is more like not hiring a qualified lifeguard because they have never gone swimming recreationally at that location.
This seems like a poor analogy.
“I don’t have experience with the ‘Megamart Pool TM’ brand of pools, but I’ve got my Lifeguard certificate through a training program that operated at a nearby lake.” Oh sorry, we want our applicants to be familiar with our specific pool with 50+ hours of paid visits logged. Please come back next year after you’ve gather this.
Exactly, this is a good analogy. I actually got the feedback that I was technically qualified and most of the other feedback was positive.
That’s not the case at all. Where did OP say they had training on the product but not the specific brand? They just said they were familiar with the product but never used it.
It does seem unfair but if I were the interviewer I would take into consideration, among other things, if the candidate cared enough about the position to use the product on their own. If I were someone applying for a job and wasn’t terribly confident in my experience for the position, I’d probably go out of my way to inform myself of the product in a hands-on manner. If it’s a competitive position, you’ve gotta compete.
You would expect the candidate to spend 60€ to try out a niche product? If I were in the position I would definitely expect them to research the product and understand how it works (I did), but not to spend that kind of money to use it.
