Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

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> If they say "I just had a kid, I spend time with them", is a good example.

Your understanding of these laws is flawed. A candidate volunteering information doesn't make the company liable for discrimination against them.

It's a common misconception that if topics like having kids or being married comes up in an interview then the company is liable to be sued for discrimination. It should be obvious that a candidate can't entrap a company by injecting this information into the interview when it wasn't asked. Even if the interviewers do ask, a discrimination lawsuit has a much higher bar than the topic simply coming up in the interview. It has to be demonstrated that the information was used to discriminate against the applicant, not just that it was discussed.

Your interpretation of my question is also flawed. I'm not asking "Tell me what you do in your free time." I'm asking them if they have anything outside of work that they'd like to share that would help their case.

> I suggest you talk to your HR department.

Please read my entire comment. The legal team reviewed our interview process and had no problems with it.

I think maybe your HR department has tried extra hard to scare you away from subjects they want to avoid, which has led to a misunderstanding of how the law actually works. It's common for HR professionals to tell interviewers that there are "illegal questions" or that if a topic comes up at all then you're going to get sued for discrimination. In reality, the legal bar for these cases is much higher. HR professionals just want to scare interviewers away entirely and drive the point home.

Asking candidates if they have an additional experience to share isn't an invitation for discrimination lawsuits. I suggest you open your mind a little bit and consider that some candidates may have more to offer than appears on the bullet points under each job on their resume.

I worked for Google for a while and there was a whole set of banned questions and topics- for example, when interviewing, I was told to never ask where somebody was from- that's discriminatory.

Originally I assumed all of this was good-faith advice from lawyers. It was only over time that I recognized that the leadership at Google continuously got itself in trouble by doing illegal things around hiring, and was telling interviewers all sorts of stuff that simply wasn't supported by law (similarly true for the constant warnings about not reading patents, or speculating about legal problems in a discoverable medium- it was the execs who fucked up, not the employees). I had to unlearn a lot when I left for another company.

Please keep asking people questions like this- I like how you phrased it: "this can only help, not hurt you".

I think a lot of this is simply asymmetric incentives for the lawyers. If they give legal advice that is overly conservative, it's some other portion of the business that suffers - we hire the wrong people, or we provide a worse product, or we lose out on revenue, or deals don't get made, or the code is overly convoluted, or employees get muzzled. If they give legal advice that is overly aggressive, they have to deal with the consequences when we get sued (at best) or they get fired (at worst). So they will always err on the side of caution.

I've also noticed a dramatic difference in how willing legal, HR, PR, REWS, etc. is to take risks now vs. back in the heyday of the 00s when the company was smaller and everybody felt like they were in it together. Some of that is probably simply because the company was a lot smaller and hence less likely to get sued, but a lot of it is because back then people tended to act in Google's interests a lot more while now they act in their own interests.

> Asking candidates if they have an additional experience to share isn't an invitation for discrimination lawsuits.

It's the fact that you decided not to hire them, because you found out that protected information. It was unrelated? Prove it in court. That's the reality of discrimination lawsuits.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree.

If you're confident in this, maybe in your next couple of interviews try "That last question is something new that I'm trying. Do you think it's good, or do you think it's too personal?". You'll have to read their body language, since the power dynamics will prevent a direct answer, for many. If you're not comfortable asking that, then that's evidence enough.

> It's the fact that you decided not to hire them, because you found out that protected information.

Again, you don't understand how this works.

If a candidate runs into your interview room and declares that they are a member of 5 protected classes, that doesn't automatically open you up to discrimination lawsuits.

How is this any different than asking someone about a past job and then they answer with "I didn't finish that project because I had kids and left for parental leave". It should be obvious that a candidate can reveal information about having kids for virtually any question.

> It was unrelated? Prove it in court.

Once again, that's not how it works. The onus is on the applicant to prove that the information was used for discrimination.

A candidate can't claim that a company discriminated against them for information they volunteered during an interview and then the company loses. They have to provide reasonable evidence to proceed to discovery, which would have to reveal something substantial that showed the information was used to discriminate, such as e-mails or chat logs.

> I don't believe you asked your legal department.

Legal was involved. Why do you only believe that your HR department wants to be involved in hiring processes, but mine obviously would not?

If you're not interested in discussing in good faith or you only want to ignore what I wrote and inject alternate facts, I can't help you.

I quickly edited that out but you saw it. I don't want to dox myself, which is why I removed it. You would trust our legal team. It's an opinion shared by every company I've ever worked for, except a startup, where they didn't know wtf they were doing, and there was no training at all: no personal questions that persuades/compels protected info. It's trivial to find this online.

To stop focusing on this last point...

> I'm not asking "Tell me what you do in your free time." I'm asking them if they have anything outside of work that they'd like to share that would help their case.

You are asking them that, in a practically indistinguishable way. Again, because of the power dynamic you don't seem to be aware of, they must give you an answer that explains why, if not. The legally appropriate response would be "I prefer not to answer what I do in my free time outside of work", which people would be uncomfortable, so they're going to be compelled to reveal to you why they don't have anything interesting, if they don't.

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