Is providing work sample for an interview a violation or good idea?

I wanted to provide some of my work samples for an upcoming interview I have. The work samples I was going to provide were written analysis/summary of certain Fund strategies or memorandum to client committees. Of course I would whiteout any client sensitive information, remove any company header/footer/logo and I wouldn’t use anything that I couldn’t find publicly myself to recreate the data.

Hiring Managers don’t look down on this do they? I thought being proactive bringing some samples would be a good thing and show how much I wanted the job.

Any thoughts? thanks,

If it is a report that you used for the actual benefit of your organization, I would count that as a violation. Even more so if you are posting for a position at a competitor of sorts. Now, one the you created on your own time to feature your analytical prowess on something your firm would not be missing or didn’t give you the resources to complete…that’s a different story.

I would not send any internal reports or memos to a prospective employer. If it’s something that is already published externally or broadly circulated to clients, that might be ok.

If its proprietary stuff and actively being used, it’s definitely a violation. Generally what you need to do is make sure that a sample does not reveal any proprietary ideas or processes and does not give away anything that your employer would consider a competitive advantage at the moment.

If you are just doing market analysis or a company report, it helps if the report is old enough that a rational reader would consider it out of date. Many companies distribute reports to prospective clients to give them a sample of their thinking anyway, so if you have discretion to do something like that for a potential client, you probably can get away with doing something like that for a potential employer.

Employers do like samples of the work you can do, because it makes your abilities stand out and be more real. Ideally, you would write something up in your non-work hours that you could say is your own work and not necessarily your employer’s intellectual property and avoid this issue entirely.

If it’s formally published, i’d say it’s definitely ok without question.

^ Disagree. That information is already reflected in current stock prices via semi-strong EMH. Spill some inside information to really get ahead of the pack.

I thought we were talking about violations, not whether or not it’s “reflected in stock prices”, which would be a separate debate

Unless you are talking about the Chinese market. Then it is fair to say that material non public information is already reflected in stock prices.