How to Tell When a Job Candidate Is Sexist
Because you really, really don’t want to accidentally hire a sexist
Most of the time, when Qian Liu passes on a job candidate, it’s for a garden-variety reason: inexperience, a personality mismatch. But recently, Liu, who estimates that she’s conducted more than a thousand interviews over the course of her career, encountered an unusually glaring red flag: One of her colleagues was flat-out ignored while talking to a candidate.
“She told me that the male candidate only addressed the male interviewers,” says Liu, currently the chief data officer of the financial technology company Guideline. “ The woman was the most senior employee of the interviewers, and the candidate was aware of that. Needless to say, he wasn’t hired.
The reasons for not wanting to hire a sexist employee should be obvious. Beyond souring the work experience — and sometimes creating significantly harmful situations — for the women at the office, having a sexist on staff can drive employees out entirely. This turnover is bad for the culture, bad for the team, and bad for the company’s bottom line: One commonly used rule of thumb is that replacing an employee costs around 33% of their salary.
But how do you weed out the manterrupters? The inappropriate joke-tellers? The people who…
