Job Interviews From the Dark Side, Part 4

I'm not sure whether my many nightmarish job-interview experiences would play best as a dark comedy routine, a cautionary job-search book, or as an educational lecture at a business seminar, but I have memories of my lifelong job-search experiences that I can't shake, no matter how much I want to. One of the most awful moments in a job seeker's life is when the interviewer asks inappropriate questions that appear to be in violation of applicable employment law. It's a lose-lose situation: if you object to the questions, you'll get no job offer, if you try and go along with the questions, it's a sneak preview of what you'll have to put up with if you get the job. 

So what to do when employers ask inappropriate questions that may violate applicable employment law? At one job-search workshop I attended, a speaker said, "You won't get these questions if you interview with a Fortune 500 company. They have lawyers that review the interview questions. But if you get out to an interview with A-B-C or X-Y-Z company somewhere, you'll be surprised how often they still ask these kinds of questions."

Illegal questions include anything that may focus on your sex, race, age, color, creed, ethnic origin, medical history, marital status, disability, or any other class protected from unlawful discrimination. These include but are not limited to questions about your birthplace, marital status, your personal life, and anything else not directly relevant to job performance. Anything not directly related to your skills, abilities and qualifications is none of the employer's business. That includes whether or not you have children and what your childcare arrangements are. That's your business, not the employer's.

I remember reading a book--it may have been Sexual Shakedown by Lin Farley--in which a study was conducted where a male interviewer asked intrusive personal questions of men, the kind of questions that women often get asked--about whether they had children and their childcare arrangements, about what their spouse thought of their working, about if they felt "out of kilter" a few days every month (hint, hint, wink, wink, nudge, nudge). The finding:  the male job applicants got up and stormed out of the interview rather than answer the questions.

Men can usually do that because they know the next guy isn't going to be so intrusive, and if they have to, they can just fall back on living off their wife or mother. Women can't. They know the next interviewer may be just as bad, and they've got bills to pay and, often, a family to feed, including perhaps that chronically unemployed partner. They may not even have a partner, they may be widowed, divorced, or abandoned, and that's why they've got to work, often desperately. Offend a prospective boss and you may end up on the sidewalk, and you still won't know where your next job interview, or job, or paycheck is coming from.

My own most troubling experience with an employer who didn't know the meaning of "fair employment policy" was when I interviewed with a Malibu company that had something to do with the ratings for radio programing. I got the interview through an organization that specialized in recruiting for entertainment jobs. However, thanks to the mental faculties of the woman who interviewed me, I never got the chance to learn much about the job or the company. 

Silly me, I thought I'd be asked questions about my skills, qualifications, and abilities--as they related to an office job involving radio ratings. I guessed the prospective employer wouldn't care that much about my familiarity with radio, it'd be more about office work, but I could explain how I knew something about the catch phrases used in the radio business. I thought, besides keyboarding, filing, and answering the phone, I'd explain how and what I knew about airplay, formats, radio call letters, record companies and their promoters, market shares, song plugging, automatic adds, eighteen with a bullet, and morning/afternoon drive. You know, the things that might affect my ability to interpret radio ratings.

Almost the first thing the woman interviewer said to me was, "Do you have children?" I didn’t want to throw “illegal question” in her face but every time I dodged it, she returned to it. She harped on it and harped on it and all attempts to talk to her about something else, anything else, were futile. Asking such a question of a woman is particularly discriminatory because it can then be an "acceptable" reason not to offer the woman a job--it's not like you don't want to hire a woman, it's just that they may have children, you know, it might interfere with the lady's job performance, having kids, you know. I asked the interviewer why she wanted to know, why she thought it was relevant to the job, and she came back with gaslighting double-talk about overtime and health insurance.  I kept refusing to allow her to invade my personal life, and never got anywhere.  

When I got home I reported the incident to the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH).  The agency looked into it and informed the woman the question was illegal, and reported back to me that she "didn't know." (Ignorance of the law is not a defense, except when the DFEH wants to move a piece of paper from the "in" basket to the "out" basket.) They said I was not entitled to a remedy because "the question played no role in the hiring." 

Listen, Lady, if the question was asked--and asked and asked--during the interview, then that's prima facie evidence that the question played a role in hiring. If the job interview played a role in hiring, and the question played an integral part in the job interview, then it played a role in hiring. If it didn't, the interviewer wouldn't have asked it--and kept harping on it and harping on it to the exclusion of any other subject. The fact remains that she should never have asked it, let alone repeated it and repeated it, "didn't know" or otherwise. It's that simple.