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?
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).