awkward job interviews

[Portia]

If anyone can tell me what marital status has to do with getting clerical work, please, enlighten me. I'd love to know. I am not by any means ashamed of being unmarried, and if being engaged and/or married had had anything to do with the position, it wouldn't have bugged me at all. (An example that comes to mind is you can't very well be an RA in single student housing and be married. Or if you're going on a study abroad program, that could be important to know for housing arrangements.) But what does marital status have to do with being able to run Microsoft Office?!

My interviewer asking not only if I were married, but later if I were engaged (him: "not yet, heh heh heh" . . . creepy), made me uncomfortable and seemed out of place. Has this happened to anyone else? I have a sneaking suspicion that had I been male, this particular query would be less likely. :S

Post script: is this even legal? I'm told "no."

[Fredjikrang]

I don't see any legal reason why the question can't be asked, but if you were in some way discriminated against because of your marital status, then there are some serious legality questions.

[A Mom, but not yours]

It is definitely not legal. As is asking your religious preference.

Experience has shown me that people ask these sorts of questions for various reasons. Some people think they're making small talk and don't realize such questions are in poor taste/illegal. Some people have prior prejudices as to whether a married or single person would do a better job. (One employer asked in my interview if I had any reasons I would be unable to be at work on time every day. It was her way to probe and see if an applicant was married. Previous single employees evidently had more struggles making it to the office on time than previous married employees.)

Either way, you really don't have to answer the question if you don't want to. And if they take offense at your lack of answer, then perhaps you should reevaluate whether you want to work for that person.

[361]

Asking anything about the following topics is not legal...

* Age
* Race, ethnicity, or color
* Gender or sex
* Country of national origin or birth place
* Religion
* Disability
* Marital or family status or pregnancy

via http://humanresources.about.com/od/inte ... _quest.htm and http://www.equalemployment.org/publicat ... awful.html

[Portia]

Either way, you really don't have to answer the question if you don't want to. And if they take offense at your lack of answer, then perhaps you should reevaluate whether you want to work for that person.

Ohhh there were definitely other reasons (a general lack of professionalism with both interviewers, really) I might not want to work there, but unfortunately, I'm poor and desperate.

Thanks for the links, guys.

[TheAnswerIs42]

I think it also depends on how it is asked. Obviously this guy made you feel creepy about it. But I remember when I interviewed for my teaching position, they asked me how long I planned on working. I told them until we had kids, which I planned on being a few years. I think that was the reponse they were fishing for while remaining on things they could legally ask. But I was really glad I told them that when I was back in her office a year later to report that we had accidentally gotten pregnant, and she could say "well, you told me that you would stop working at that point when you interviewed with us, so I am excited for you guys and sorry that we will lose you."

But again, they got that information out of me with a perfectly legal question. I did have a boss once who creeped me out in strange ways, and I wish I could remember what he asked me in that interview.

[Imogen]

I think it also depends on how it is asked. Obviously this guy made you feel creepy about it. But I remember when I interviewed for my teaching position, they asked me how long I planned on working. I told them until we had kids, which I planned on being a few years. I think that was the reponse they were fishing for while remaining on things they could legally ask. But I was really glad I told them that when I was back in her office a year later to report that we had accidentally gotten pregnant, and she could say "well, you told me that you would stop working at that point when you interviewed with us, so I am excited for you guys and sorry that we will lose you."

But again, they got that information out of me with a perfectly legal question. I did have a boss once who creeped me out in strange ways, and I wish I could remember what he asked me in that interview.

but that's just a loophole way of getting around it. it's none of their business when/if you plan to have kids or if you're married or not, and whether he meant the question innocently, it's still breaking the law. portia really has every right to report that guy, and if he's the HR person, i feel bad for that company.

[Tao]

Asking anything about the following topics is not legal...

* Age
* Race, ethnicity, or color
* Gender or sex
* Country of national origin or birth place
* Religion
* Disability
* Marital or family status or pregnancy

via http://humanresources.about.com/od/inte ... _quest.htm and http://www.equalemployment.org/publicat ... awful.html

I was quite surprised to see some of these. While I can understand the ethical issues, I guess I can see too many reasons that an employer would want to know many of these things.

Many of these issues affect not only work performance, but can influence the possibility of getting any work done in the first place.

If you are not allowed to ask about age when hiring a waiter/waitress, but there are laws pertaining to not allowing underage people serve alcohol, couldn't employers end up in a fix? Can I, as a man, demand to be hired for a position as a counselor in a refuge for abused women, where my gender will definitely affect how I am received? I find it amusing that employers apparently cannot ask for country of birth, but the constitution requires that the President be born in the US. Can a Satanist demand to be hired into a Catholic school? I have a heart condition that can render me inoperative at any given moment, for the most part, my disability doesn't hamper me, but do you want me as your child's bus driver? (I seem to remember our police department turning away someone due to their epilepsy.) As for marital status, I happen to know all too well that the CES will not hire you as a seminary teacher if you are single. If you are working in a co-ed atmosphere, it has been shown that being single significantly alters performance. Or perhaps a supervisor has an overly jealous wife.

I don't know. While denying someone due to something along these lines that has absolutely no affect on work (race in almost every case I could think of) is obviously wrong, and it is difficult to avoid without cutting the question altogether(after discovering your religion, we decided not to hire you over personality differences...) I think that an honest employer is getting the raw end of the deal on this one.

[TheAnswerIs42]

Absolutly. I mean, if someone else had been interviewed for my job and said they never planned on quitting, I would completely expect that person to have been hired before I was. I think a company needs to know criteria coming in that affect how much they will gain from you working for them.

Granted, it actually saves the school district money to re-hire a replacement rather than keep a seasoned teacher, because the longer you stay the more they have to pay you. So maybe there was someone who was going to stay indefinatly, and I was the one that pushed them out. But who said that school systems have to make sense?

[Portia]

They did ask me how long I planned on being able to work, which seems perfectly legitimate. But not only asking if I was married, but engaged (certainly does not seem relevant to the task at hand!) just gave me the jibblies.

Oh, and Imogen, you overestimate the corporate structure of places of employment around here. The industry for which I was interviewing (BYU-approved housing) is notorious for having incompetent management, and no one really in charge.

[361]

@Tao

My friend works as a recruiter and does job interviews all the time.

The best you can do in most situations is simply inquire as to whether the candidate can adequately do the job. (On matters of legal issues I would suspect you can ask more pointed questions... i.e. "Are you over 21" though I'm not 100% sure... I'll query him about it next time I see him)

[361]

i.e.

A person comes in in a wheel chair...

Which can you legally ask them?

How long have you had the wheel chair?
OR
How did you get the wheel chair?

-------------------------------------

In his words...

"Neither... You _IGNORE_ the wheel chair"

[Katya]

I think it also depends on how it is asked. Obviously this guy made you feel creepy about it. But I remember when I interviewed for my teaching position, they asked me how long I planned on working. I told them until we had kids, which I planned on being a few years. I think that was the reponse they were fishing for while remaining on things they could legally ask. But I was really glad I told them that when I was back in her office a year later to report that we had accidentally gotten pregnant, and she could say "well, you told me that you would stop working at that point when you interviewed with us, so I am excited for you guys and sorry that we will lose you."

But again, they got that information out of me with a perfectly legal question. I did have a boss once who creeped me out in strange ways, and I wish I could remember what he asked me in that interview.

but that's just a loophole way of getting around it. . . .

Not necessarily. If The Answer was moving in 6 months or if she only needed temporary work or if she was 3 months pregnant . . . all of those could affect how long whe was willing or able to work. And if she was only planning on working until she got pregnant, but didn't know when that would be, she could have truthfully said something like "I don't know" or "Definitely for a few years, etc."

The point is that HR can't ask if you have kids, but they can ask if you're planning on leaving in 3 months. (They just can't infer the latter from the answer to the former.)

[Katya]

If you are not allowed to ask about age when hiring a waiter/waitress, but there are laws pertaining to not allowing underage people serve alcohol, couldn't employers end up in a fix?

No, because you can ask "are you old enough to legally serve alcohol?" Which, yes, does give away some information about age, but only as it pertains to legal issues.

Can I, as a man, demand to be hired for a position as a counselor in a refuge for abused women, where my gender will definitely affect how I am received?

That's a good point, and I'm not sure how that works, although there must be a way of doing it because there are jobs which do need to be reasonably gender-specific.

I find it amusing that employers apparently cannot ask for country of birth, but the constitution requires that the President be born in the US. Can a Satanist demand to be hired into a Catholic school?

I think that religious employers are allowed to descriminate based on religion. (BYU obviously does.)

If you are working in a co-ed atmosphere, it has been shown that being single significantly alters performance.

Then you need to hire mature single people and if they can't perform the task adequatly, you can fire them. Really, though, there's no reason to assume, ahead of time, that all single people will be terrible at their jobs if they have to *GASP!* work with someone of the opposite sex.

Or perhaps a supervisor has an overly jealous wife.

Then . . . that's between the supervisor and his wife? Seriously . . .

If you haven't ever been in a position where you were consistently discriminated against because people held mistaken beliefs against people who belong to your "group," I guess this doesn't seem like a big deal to you. Happily, most of the situations you posted have perfectly legal workarounds that don't involve giving in to stupid stereotypes.