20 ms·

Decades ago, in the days before uber, my employer would fly in candidates from college campuses as part of an onsite interview. The candidate would fly in the n

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• cmckn 4y ago
  Hm, I don't dig this. I don't think it's ethical to evaluate a candidate's interactions when they weren't informed they were being evaluated. People are stressed heading into an interview, and may be upset afterwards. Unless they're interviewing for a public-facing role, I don't see how this behavior is relevant to the job; and discussing it with a hiring committee invites all sorts of "cultural fit" biases that make the hiring process inconsistent and discriminatory. If a person's behavior would hinder their ability to do the job, then that's worth a rejection; but "rudeness" is a very subjective thing. edit: to clarify, I'm talking about behavior that could be interpreted in different ways by different people. If you tell a driver to fuck off, yeah; I don't want to hire you or work with you. The parent gave no example of the behavior they'd reject a candidate for, and I assume it'd be reasonable; my point is just that this kind of thing is hard to do right and I'd avoid it.
  • yodon 4y ago
    Your character is defined by who you are and how you behave when you think no one is watching you.
    • webmobdev 4y ago
      Worry not whether your kid are listening to what you say, worry that they are always watching you.
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
    I don't want to work with anyone who treats service workers like garbage, no matter what mood they are in. I have never in my life, no matter how bad or good of a day I am having, taken my frustrations out on a service worker for whatever internal/external stressors are happening to me.
    • genewitch 4y ago
      I find this extremely hard to believe. I, too, try very hard to not get upset at "service workers", but at a certain point, if someone has a bad attitude with me i'll eventually give it right back. This has only happened a few times, off the top of my head: support at ISPs a couple of times, creditors who were harassing me without reason, and one time extremely rude and racist people at a California School transportation office. Sure, i probably could hang up, turn the other cheek, whatever. And i'm sure my responses/actions made them no nevermind. You might be as stoic and nonplussed as you claim, but we're all the heroes of our own stories, or something.
      • bee_rider 4y ago
        This would make sense as an objection if the taxi driver had specifically been asked to be a dick, to test the candidates. I'd assume they have some idea that the taxi driver is a fairly reasonable person (and apparently they know him well enough to trust his judgement).
        • alanh 4y ago
          To be fair, the comment you were replying to was strictly a response to someone's personal claim, not about the taxi driver scenario in particular
        • genewitch 4y ago
          English is a tricky language, and in my reading of GP i was incredulous at the word "never", especially since service workers can be in bad moods or stressed and that becomes, to you (or me, or GP), external stressors. Maybe i'm a bad person?
  • TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
    It's understandable that people might be stressed or upset, but if they take it out on people they consider beneath them that's not a good sign.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • cmckn 4y ago
      > they consider beneath them It's this kind of inference that doesn't belong on a hiring committee; you likely don't have enough data to support this kind of conclusion about a person. The parent comment made a similar assumption about racial animus. I just don't think spying or eavesdropping is an effective way to evaluate a candidate.
      • Disruptive_Dave 4y ago
        Had the same thought. Lots of really big assumptions here with zero fact or evidence to back them up. And poor lack of awareness. Be careful judging, my friends.
      • ekanes 4y ago
        Finding out that someone is toxic only after they've got the job is problematic. The idea here is to evaluate them when they aren't aware and on their best behavior.
      • brewdad 4y ago
        Let's remove some of the inflammatory language and look at more as this person doesn't "matter" to me. If I think the taxi driver is just a taxi driver, I am going to treat them as I would any person I'm not likely to meet again. Ideally, with respect but when one's guard is down an asshole is more likely to act like one. In the interview room, any candidate will be on their best behavior since impressing those people "matters" greatly. Same for the behavioral lunch sessions that many companies also use. If I have any sense, I'm going to recognize that this is still part of the "interview" even though we may be at a restaurant offsite discussing anything from the job to the Yankees pitchers. The argument, that I tend to agree with, is that gathering info from the taxi driver is a better indicator of true character. I don't expect the taxi driver to deliver a full psychological report but I would like to know if they felt mistreated in some way.
  • bobkazamakis 4y ago
    > I don't think it's ethical to evaluate a candidate on interactions that they weren't informed were being evaluated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect >I don't see how this behavior is relevant to the job; and evaluating it on a hiring committee invites all sorts of "cultural fit" biases that generally making the hiring process inconsistent and discriminatory. I don't see how not doing this, really changes anything. The process is already inconsistent and discriminatory. The only thing this really tests is integrity.
    • johnnyanmac 4y ago
      I'm not sure if the Hawthorne effect applies that strongly here. It has to do with worker productivity, not behavior. In fact, this IBM test may weed out a few employees who are otherwise perfectly kind people in general public outings.
  • rrook 4y ago
    Do you see this as being substantially different to evaluating a candidate's behavior while in a waiting room between interview sessions?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • rmah 4y ago
    I disagree, the best time to evaluate how a candidate behaves towards other people is when they don't know they are being evaluated. Were they stressed before/after the interview? Well, how one behaves when stressed matters too. Finally, yes, rudeness is subjective, but so are most things in life.
  • hnarn 4y ago
    > I don't think it's ethical to evaluate a candidate's interactions when they weren't informed they were being evaluated. That makes about as much sense as saying that you shouldn’t be held responsible for stealing office supplies because no one informed you that there were cameras installed. If you treat cab drivers and other service personnel badly, that’s because you’re a shit person. It’s really that simple. I’ve been in extremely stressful situations in my life involving lots of travel and I’ve yet to “take it out” on a third party.
    • Melatonic 4y ago
      I generally apply a similar test when dating - if the person is a huge asshole to the service staff then it generally is not going anywhere
      • geocrasher 4y ago
        Giant red flag, indeed.
      • bee_rider 4y ago
        Sorry, unless you tell them you are testing their dateablilty you have to ignore any behavior on their part.
        • DFHippie 4y ago
          This needs a "/s".
          • bee_rider 4y ago
            Sarcasm is a rhetorical trust-fall, I refuse to cheapen it by adding the /s.
            • SilasX 4y ago
              Then you refuse to be a helpful contributor to discussions. Life is littered with cases where people thought they understood each other but didn’t. If there’s a chance you’ll be misinterpreted, you’re not communicating well and need to take steps to correct it, just out of general empathy for those who don’t have the exact same knowledge as you.
  • wruza 4y ago
    Ethics aside, in my experience this type of character tends to contaminate their surroundings with this undirected negativity. It’s like a black hole that has no sides, only the mass of their ego. I have a friend like this, and while we are still friends and can manage that, I would never work together with him. It’s okay to be sad, stressed, angry. Not okay to spill it all over the world. Otoh, not clear what gp means by “rude”. Someone could perceive sad/neutral silence and “thank you, goodbye” as rude-ish too.
  • jameshart 4y ago
    Asking for character references from someone who has interacted with a candidate is perfectly fine. I think where this might get dodgy is with the possibility that some of the candidates might have tipped this driver, which puts us in the position of asking for an opinion about several candidates from someone who might have been compensated by some of them.
    • genewitch 4y ago
      if i were to institute something like this, the driver would be fairly (and well) compensated to do this task. Any tips would be handed over at the end, so there's no consideration of compensation involved. Obviously tipping is a data point, but it wouldn't influence the drivers report beyond that checkbox.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • jameshart 4y ago
        Now we're adding wage-theft on top of both assessing candidates on their disposable wealth, and accepting and keeping payment from them? The ethics get pretty muddy the further down this path we walk.
        • genewitch 4y ago
          i find most things murky if you really try to walk for a while. I always find it interesting how i'm perceived. I didn't intend wage-theft as part of the idea. Also it is possible that there's people who are qualified to do this work (passenger/commercial endorsements on their driver's license), good character actors, and generally ethical. I took it all as a thought exercise, anyhow. Having been on the hiring side of the table, i'm not the "team fit" or "social" interviewer. Technical and creative questions. I let people in their fields deal with how their interviews go. So all told i wouldn't be in the position to hire someone to filter potential hires.
  • sliken 4y ago
    If you want a healthy organization you need to be able to trust people, even when you can't watch them. This requires things like lack of deception, treating people decently, not lying, not stealing (physical or credit for ideas/work accomplished), etc. If you end up with people who ass kiss those above them, abuse those below them, backstab and/or sabotage the competition, focus on empire building, and misrepresent things for their benefit then your best staff will find elsewhere to work. Those that stay will fight among themselves and will only help the company or it's customers when it happens to overlap with their other goals. Sounds kind of like the Dilbert comic now that I think about it.
  • cmckn 4y ago
    Responses here are really surprising to me. Should a Google hiring committee consider your search history, too? What's lacking from this conversation is any definition of what behavior we're actually talking about, and the conclusions (understandably) vary wildly. This is a similar dilemma to what a hiring committee would face when reviewing a second-hand narrative from a contractor about a candidate. I don't think a company interested in having a healthy culture should spy or eavesdrop on people.
    • johnnyanmac 4y ago
      >Should a Google hiring committee consider your search history, too? You may be conducting reducto ad absurdum here, but this is unironically one of the biggest shifts of the Overton window from millenial to Gen Z. It may not be your search history, but they sure can check your Twitter/Facebook/etc. going back years to weed you out. It was kind of awkward for my demographic of late millenials, but gen z candidates entering the workforce may very well have their entire life online to see. It's honestly a bit chilling, but I think the lines have been set in the sand here.
  • version_five 4y ago
    I agree with you. I understand that how you behave as a member of society is useful information and it's valid to not hire a jerk. Having the taxi driver as a spy is a bit like bugging a confessional though. Like you say, if they really limit the taxi driver's input to "was he directly a jerk to me", that sounds ok, but like any surveillance, it's unlikely it really remains limited to such a fixed scope and other information doesn't come in and bias the answer. A taxi is where a lot of people feel safe from observation, and may say things not meant for anyone's ears. As an aside, I'm always shocked at what people will start saying in a taxi/uber, particularly I'm thinking of talking about confidential work stuff. My personal view is you never know who the driver is and loose lips sink ships, don't say anything in front of him that you wouldn't say in public. But I know many don't see it that way.
  • vlunkr 4y ago
    I'm inclined to agree. When a company watches you without your knowledge it's a clever hack, but when the government does it it's a creepy social credit system? If the hiring company secretly owned the taxi company, wouldn't that be creepy too? Also, when you're making hiring decisions, why are you trusting the opinion of a taxi driver who isn't even on your payroll? They certainly have their own prejudice, and if they know they have weight in hiring decisions, they could very well just be feeding you lies.
    • batch12 4y ago
      If companies shared this data or it followed you around then this would be akin to a creepy social credit system. If it's an observervation during a test then it is just a kobayashi maru and not the same thing.
  • miniwark 4y ago
    Well, they know beforehand than they are evaluated for an interview... It's a bit like psychological or sociological studies. All the time, for ethics reasons, the researchers must tell the subjects than they are part of a psychological or sociological test. But, the test is generally not exactly what is said to the people. For example by testing something hidden or by using actors. See for example the Asch conformity experiments or the Cognitive Dissonance Experiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments https://explorable.com/cognitive-dissonance-experiment https://explorable.com/cognitive-dissonance-experiment In this case the people where told than they where tested, no surprise here... That said, is it really ethic to trick people by telling them than they are tested on "something" but in reality testing them on something else ?
  • johnnyanmac 4y ago
    >I don't think it's ethical to evaluate a candidate's interactions when they weren't informed they were being evaluated I may have agrees 15 years ago. But in a day and age where one random tweet of personal opinion can cause a PR disaster to an entire company, it seems inevitable that they want to make sure a candidate isn't going to potentially go off the rails. For better or worse, many people are connected worldwide for a signifigant part of the day, and have accounts that are easy to cross reference. e.g. a twitter account has the same name and location as a linkedIn profile. ---- with all that said, I'd be surprise if it was anymore than what was described; an ability to interact without unneeded hostility in life. I don't think you're gonna be dinged for failing to count change correctly and have that impact your eligibility despite whiteboarding your practiced algorithms to perfection.
• treeman79 4y ago
  My dad worked for Boeing. He got to take a ride in the company limo once. Driver started telling him all the dirty gossip. Which executives were having affairs. Which ones were scheming, etc.
• Bahamut 4y ago
  I've heard of airline companies doing similar when interviewing flight attendants - United will fly you to Newark to interview, but often there will be people shadowing candidates to see how they behave during their travels and that feedback is taken into account when evaluating candidates.
  • metadat 4y ago
    It's impressive if they have the resources and sophistication to really execute on this.
    • facet1ous 4y ago
      They could just note to flight attendants that there are passengers interviewing w/ the airline and have them raise any red flags pretty easily.
    • _moof 4y ago
      It's really nothing - just a different fare code. Gate agents and cabin crew can already tell when someone is a non-rev (e.g. an employee using flight benefits), so looping them in on the backend is just a quick schedule lookup and a couple more people on the feedback system. (N.B.: I'm not saying this actually happens, because I don't know; just that it would be very little trouble using systems that are already in place. I, for one, didn't change out of my suit until after I'd gotten back home when I did an airline interview.)
  • sargun 4y ago
    A strong part of me believes that United indexes on how much of an asshole the person can be. /s. But, seriously, I feel like if you're using a potential employer's services, you should assume they're taking that into account when they're hiring you.
    • influx 4y ago
      Seriously, compare the employees of United vs Southwest and there's a huge difference in attitude. Southwest employees seem happy, friendly, helpful, while United... Not.
• hindsightbias 4y ago
  Was told if you interview with the FBI, the interview starts the moment you go through the door. And be careful what you say at the bar.
  • Melatonic 4y ago
    The FBI has a bar inside their offices?
    • cbsmith 4y ago
      I think the comment was more that the interview doesn't stop when you leave the office...
      • Melatonic 4y ago
        I was joking mainly but it also sounded like a potential good story!
    • sonthonax 4y ago
      British Intelligence has bars inside their offices. In fact the British security services are basically an oxbridge drinking society.
      • User23 4y ago
        My brother was in the USMC and was a bit jealous that the Australian Navy guys had pubs on their ships.
      • basementcat 4y ago
        Are the pubs meant to train new operatives to avoid awkward situations like this? https://www.google.com/amp/s/screenrant.com/inglourious-basterds-tarantino-3-fingers-hicox-hellstrom-theory/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/screenrant.com/inglourious-bast...
      • erik_seaberg 4y ago
        I’m reminded of http://home.xnet.com/~warinner/pizzacites.html http://home.xnet.com/~warinner/pizzacites.html where a spike in pizza delivery at the Pentagon would foretell major events.
• ALittleLight 4y ago
  I have seen several stories like this - the janitor, or secretary, or whoever is actually a trusted individual who is the true judge of character. To me, it seems implausible, more of a "feel good" story, but it also seems ill advised. Does the driver know he's part of the loop? Does the driver attend the debrief? Does the driver distinguish between great, normal, sub-normal, and bad social skills? What portion of jerks would be jerks to a single specific tax driver? Even a big jerk probably isn't a jerk to everyone all the time, and even a nice person may be rude or obnoxious occasionally. Stories like this also remind me of the "Magical Negro" trope where a simple but helpful black person offers sage advise or magic to help the protagonists out of a jam. These "The taxi driver was your real interviewer" stories don't (necessarily) have a racial element, but it's the same, magic wisdom of simple lower class folk idea. When two people don't get along it's hard to find the objective truth by talking to one of them. Maybe the candidate didn't talk to the taxi driver because he was nervously thinking about the interviewer and that came off to the driver as aloof or arrogant. Maybe the driver didn't like the candidate's race, gender, experience, age, etc. Maybe something was said that was misunderstood by one or both parties. Point is - it's a very weak test.
  • JoBrad 4y ago
    I didn’t read it as a deliberate test, but that if the driver let them know the candidate was rude, it would be a negative mark.
    • ALittleLight 4y ago
      "The taxi driver would sometimes complain to the people in the hiring loop when a candidate was rude to him." That also seems pretty implausible to me. The taxi driver is going to text or email HR or the hiring manager or someone? How frequently are people so rude to the taxi driver that they are disqualified from consideration? Does the taxi driver get compensated? Why is the taxi driver doing this? Does anybody vet the taxi driver's personality testing ability?
      • krisoft 4y ago
• analog31 4y ago
  There's a saying among musicians: "Be careful of how you treat the people you meet on your way up, because you'll meet them again on your way down."
  • blobbers 4y ago
    That's not just musicians who say that. My mom says that.
  • seoguru 4y ago
    yep, from little feat: https://youtu.be/PE5Ve0y0m1Y https://youtu.be/PE5Ve0y0m1Y
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• solarhoma 4y ago
  Sounds fine on the surface. Until you dive deeper and think the taxi driver will eventually be aware of the leverage they have. And decide to be malicious with their own biases.
  • Rebelgecko 4y ago
    I think thats a possibility for anyone involved with interviewing/hiring. At some point you have to trust people you know to not be malicious
• allwedoiswin 4y ago
  Also weeding out people not paranoid enough to think that the taxi driver might be a confederate ;)
  • chrischen 4y ago
    If your default state is asshole and have to be paranoid to put up an act of being a "non-asshole" then that's already not a good start.
• iancmceachern 4y ago
  I worked at a place where my boss told me this story. He was interviewing an engineer, on my bosses way in to the office that morning he was cut off in traffic. He honked, the person who cut him off flippes him the bird. He then followed that car all the way into the company parking lot. He had to interview the guy, but he didn't get the job.
• chrischen 4y ago
  I suppose nowadays we can just ask candidates to show their Uber rating!
• onigiri420 4y ago
  This didn't happen.
• b20000 4y ago
  proud of yourself for being a bunch of psychos? what is worse, this, or the guy under severe stress taking a taxi and not “engaging” because he has other shit on his mind?
  • broAhmed 4y ago
    Being quiet in a taxi is perfectly normal. Barking orders at them, complaining that they're not going fast enough, treating them as beneath you, etc.: those are rude.
  • InfiniteRand 4y ago
    I think the issue isn't if the taxi driver actively likes a guy but more if the person does something so egregious to leave a deeply negative mark (or at least that's how I would use such a report from a taxi driver). Stress is a reasonable excuse, but it's also reasonable for many jobs to require a minimal level of curtesy even under stress, especially in a highly collaborative environment
• lenkite 4y ago
  What happens when people just stay silent and do not engage the driver in conversation ? Does the Driver mark them down as a "bad egg" also ?
• allisdust 4y ago
  I'm assuming its for positions having customer interactions. If not, the rejected ones are the lucky ones because the company sounds like too smart for its own good. What's next? sending a fake date during probation to evaluate how they behave with their spouses?
• CaptainZapp 4y ago
  A man who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice man. Dave Barry
• iex_xei 4y ago
  I'm thinking of a scenario where the driver turns out to be the interviewer. Real life LinkedIn story.