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Is it common to interview candidates from rival companies to extract information
Hi all,
I recently had an interview with a large company for a sales position. This company is a direct competitor to the company I’m currently at and several aspects of the interview seemed shady. A lot of the questions were completely irrelevant to the role in question and more about what I was doing at my current company. Examples below:
How does our product X compare to your product Y?
What steps do you take to make sure your product Y functions as intended?
What could we do to increase market share for product X?
What are the main issues you face when selling products from your current portfolio?
I was speaking to another member of our sales team internally and she said it sounds like they were trying to extract information to enable them to counter our sales strategy and push their own product. Is this a common practice? If so it seems very deceitful, especially for a large global company…
I’m not sure a company would invite someone to interview just because they’re working at a rival company.
But if you’ve submitted your CV to them proactively then maybe.
They’d be stupid not to ask you these questions (I would!).
You have to be careful in answering them though if you’re still under contract.
I know my company has done this proactively. Like, literally had recruiters chase competitors higher performing sales people and invited them to a head hunted like interview.
Immoral? Probably. Illegal? Probably not.
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