Is it OK for a company to expect using their paid product for a job interview?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Of the two positions stated, theirs in the interview feedback and yours here, yours is BY FAR the more reasonable. That they would even feel free to say that to you indicates a bizarre level of entitlement or pre-employment loyalty there, one that's made worse if it was the literal truth.

Entitlement is like an iceberg: what you see is just the tip. There's always a whole lot more right behind it.

So let's go there. I haven't seen anyone else bring it up yet, but hypothetically, let's say you drank the koolaid about their brand and, to increase your chances, you did spend a wad of cash (that you probably can't easily afford) on their product before you even got to the interview. You walk in with that experience, able to tell them you've had their lessons and talk about their platform from a user's experience, etc. Great!

Now what? How much farther does that actually get you? Not a goddamn bit, IMO, since you're still behind anyone who has ever worked on a product of their own brand, and/or kissed whatever other invisible and undefined rings they want most but were not actually disclosed in the job posting. You spent all that cash, but your deficits as a candidate are still hanging in the air: you've never actually worked on it, just familiarized yourself with the product, albeit at a cost to you.

I am so glad you are writing this from the perspective of "should I have spent the cash?" rather than the perspective of "I spent this cash and now I'm out" because above and beyond the weirdness of their behavior, the last place you ever want to sink cash is on a job posting that can't be bothered to include its most important requirements. Doesn't matter that it's a well known company, individuals and departments can be unethical too, and these certainly were.

It's also entirely possible there's an internal battle going on over this job, with some insisting it should go to someone already in-house and others, possibly even company policy, forcing it to be posted to external candidates -- but in reality it has already been decided and they are just going through the motions of ticking the boxes until they can hire the one they wanted from the start. If so, you were never going to win it, and the whole thing was a gargantuan waste of time.

Add to that the fact that the posting itself omitted the company's own most important requirement for the job, and I can only add to the chorus of people here who have already said you dodged a bullet.

Relax, you did good. Glad you made the decision you did. Best of luck in your job hunt.

nope. not unless they give you a freebie. Main example I can think of companies having this requiremnet are mlms.

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.

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"

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.