4 ms·

I was also part of this sort of interview once. They specifically asked personal questions - parents stuff, relationship, etc. Definitely not work related. It w

I was also part of this sort of interview once. They specifically asked personal questions - parents stuff, relationship, etc. Definitely not work related. It was indeed a very strange and exhausting experience. I could've definetly refused to answer some of the questions or drop out of the interview altogether, but not sure why I haven't. So yeah, this type of interview exists so I highly doubt the interviewer interviewing OP was asking about work stuff...

BugsJustFindMe 4mo ago
> They specifically asked personal questions - parents stuff, relationship, etc. In the US any employer who asks you about personal relationships during an interview is opening themselves up to an illegal discrimination lawsuit.
- calcifer 4mo ago
  Which protected characteristic does "personal relationships" fall under? It's vague enough to mean almost anything you want it to be, and I struggle to imagine any sort of successful prosecution.
  - taberiand 4mo ago
    Discrimination of sexual orientation, for example, depending on how it's asked. Just one of those areas best left alone in an interview
  - nkrisc 4mo ago
    There’s a reason interviewers in the US won’t (or shouldn’t) even ask if the candidate has a spouse. If they ask something about that specifically, and the answer indicates some kind of protected status (a man says “my husband” or reveal which place of worship they got married in) and they then decline the candidate, the candidate could make the claim they were denied because they’re gay or practice whatever religion or something else. Asking personal questions could be seen as a way to elicit information about a protected status and thus give a rejected candidate ammunition for a claim, whether warranted or not. It’s best to just keep questions focused on the workplace.
    - DangitBobby 4mo ago
      I think people vastly overstate the amount of actual risk companies are taking when they engage is possibly illegal behavior, especially on this forum.
      - voakbasda 4mo ago
        Having been on the sidelines for spurious claims of this nature, these sorts of lawsuits are a huge risk: the cost of mounting a defense can easily bankrupt a small business, even if the claims turn out to be baseless. Even in the case of complete innocence, it often becomes a he-said-she-said situation, and the outcome boils down to which side presents the best set of “facts”. I use quotes there because my broader experience with the court system routinely shows that it does not need be burdened by the “truth” or “facts”. That is probably because the regular cast in those venues are literally trained and practiced liars.
        dmoy 4mo ago
        I think it also depends on how big of a company. If someone (say perhaps, GP) mostly has experience in smaller companies, they might not have had the law of large numbers bring the lawsuit cudgel to bear on their company before. But if you're at a large enough company, you're absolutely getting sued for this from time to time, so you'll have the "how to not get sued" training before you're allowed to interview. (Edit: this isn't limited to interviews. There's many, many examples of things that large companies will not touch due to legal risk, that smaller companies will... either due to lack of knowledge on the legal risk (maybe no legal department even exists yet?) or intentionally as a gamble)
      - nkrisc 4mo ago
        Likely true, and I’m sure many companies go unpunished despite engaging in it, but that doesn’t make it a good idea, and probably the kind of thing that could ruin a small business if they did get caught up in it.
  - zdragnar 4mo ago
    Never ever prompt someone to discuss personal relationships in an interview. The moment the conversation drifts into religion, family status, child count, sexuality or gender makeup, or any number of other things, you can easily run afoul of state or federal laws, or open yourself to discrimination lawsuits.
  - tetha 4mo ago
    Women in a committed relationship can enter a medical situation that renders then unable to work for 6-9 months, + 2 - 3 years of leave afterwards. Men don't, that's just a month or two twice. It is illegal, and in my book also immoral to deny such a candidate, but the other side of the coin is there.
  - gosub100 4mo ago
    Employer fishing to see if the person is married, which will require additional dependents on health insurance. Married is possibly more likely to have kids and take more time off for them or maternity/paternity leave.
- like_any_other 4mo ago
  Even just an IQ test [1] or teacher licensing test [2,3] opens them to illegal discrimination, so that's not saying much. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. [2] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/black-latino-teachers-collecting-835-million-in-discrimination-lawsuit-11657800508 https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/black-latino-teachers-... [3] https://teachercertification.com/nystce/multi-subject-arts-and-sciences-245/ https://teachercertification.com/nystce/multi-subject-arts-a...
  - rad-b 4mo ago
    Working in selection, I can say it’s more nuanced than that. Any measurement can be used as long as it is relevant to the business and related to performance. For example, you’re fine to reject people based on height if you’re hiring basketball players and being higher predicts scoring more points. Or even reject people based on gender (or other protected classes) if you can demonstrate that that specific group is absolutely necessary for you e.g. you want a counselor working with sexual trauma survivors and have evidence that matching patients to counselor on gender gives meaningfully better results for said patients. The specific cases you mention and the finer point is how do you demonstrate the necessity of a measure? Is high general IQ absolutely necessary for SWEs? Or is it enough to have a high logical reasoning, but don’t need spatial? Do you really need high IQ or is it enough to have a lot of practical experience with hands on skills? Do you need higher IQ to do zero to one development vs code maintenance? The devil’s always in the details with these kinds of questions, and it’s definitely not a blanket “you can’t use anything”.
    - like_any_other 4mo ago
      Yeah if you're willing to go into a decade-long court fight then maybe they'll allow you to use a test (where the burden of proof is on the employer to show the test is necessary, i.e. guilty until proven innocent). Or maybe you'll be liable for millions of dollars in compensation. And even something as seemingly reasonable as an IQ test for a knowledge work position is illegal.
ido 4mo ago
Doesn’t that open them to discrimination lawsuits?
olbeefy 4mo ago
At that point, I think I would have just started making things up or telling stories from other people I knew. Some random interviewer has literally no right to be asking me personal questions so I have no problem improvising some fun answers for them.
wolfi1 4mo ago
my father was a turd miner in virginia and his father was a goat ball licker (c) Stephen Colbert
nkrisc 4mo ago
If they’re specifically asking about personal things like that then those are very inappropriate interview questions.
cdud3 4mo ago
Rejecting the question is actually how you pass. Open with "I leave everything private at home when at work hence my answer for the work position is: [here the answer but scoped and formulated to your work life and NOT to your private life]".
- nsxwolf 4mo ago
  You don't want to pass an interview like that.
  - cdud3 4mo ago
    Its an effective way to sort out those candidates who are not able to leave private stuff at home.
    - Dusseldorf 4mo ago
      Also a great way for candidates to filter out employers who play bizarre mind games and think personal trick questions are appropriate in an interview.
      - dpark 4mo ago
        Literally he’s saying to behave inappropriately in a professional interview and see if the candidate plays along. Might as well see if you can get the candidate to offer a bribe or sexual favors for the job since we’re going all in on entrapment.
        cdud3 4mo ago
        The opposite. Are you breaking the rule to leave your private stuff home just because the other side is or are you capable of keeping out of such sources of interpersonal conflicts, take over and redirect the discussion back to a professional level? Of course it depends for what field and role you apply. For any leading role or customer contact point the capability to stay professional is essential. If you flip burgers at McDonald's then it's your right to be grumpy.
jolmg 4mo ago
Besides the point about separating personal and work life, there's the aspect of having the self-respect to maintain your own privacy. You wouldn't answer deep personal questions from a random stranger on the street. Some questions might've been too invasive to answer were even some family and friends to ask them. Yet, it seems they felt like they should answer some interviewer they just met. It's ultimately the responsibility of the person answering to select what and how much of themselves to share, depending on the relationship. If the interviewer were to ask, "tell me your most embarrassing moment you had while having sex with someone", you wouldn't answer that. If they asked "tell me about the hardest day of your life" and the real, real answer was somehow that time you had that embarrassing moment while having sex with someone, you still wouldn't answer that. You would answer with what you'd be comfortable sharing with the random interviewer, if anything, else you can just decline the question. The "embarrassing sex" is an exaggerated example. You can set your limits differently, in order to not feel > completely emotionally drained as the OP put it. Setting your limits such that your personal life is outside of what your comfortable sharing with the random interviewer would be appropriate. GP comment on separating personal and work life said to imagine they tacked "... at work" at the end. You can also imagine "... that you're comfortable with sharing" as a more general rule.
chaosharmonic 4mo ago
I once had an interviewer ask me, several years back, about the religious affiliations of my college. It's supposed to mean "at work," but that doesn't at all mean that you can assume the interviewer is going to understand that.
overgard 4mo ago
Legally, asking personal questions in an interview that are unrelated to the job is a huge minefield, ie, you could be opening the company to discrimination lawsuits. Huge red flag that the company isn't very professional.
- gopher_space 4mo ago
  The minefield is enormous but there are only like five or six mines in it and they're all really well marked. It's something adults navigate every day. I don't actually care about personal details, I'm just looking for a topic you can use to explain your point of view for a few minutes.

BugsJustFindMe 4mo ago

> They specifically asked personal questions - parents stuff, relationship, etc. In the US any employer who asks you about personal relationships during an interview is opening themselves up to an illegal discrimination lawsuit.

calcifer 4mo ago
Which protected characteristic does "personal relationships" fall under? It's vague enough to mean almost anything you want it to be, and I struggle to imagine any sort of successful prosecution.
- taberiand 4mo ago
  Discrimination of sexual orientation, for example, depending on how it's asked. Just one of those areas best left alone in an interview
- nkrisc 4mo ago
  There’s a reason interviewers in the US won’t (or shouldn’t) even ask if the candidate has a spouse. If they ask something about that specifically, and the answer indicates some kind of protected status (a man says “my husband” or reveal which place of worship they got married in) and they then decline the candidate, the candidate could make the claim they were denied because they’re gay or practice whatever religion or something else. Asking personal questions could be seen as a way to elicit information about a protected status and thus give a rejected candidate ammunition for a claim, whether warranted or not. It’s best to just keep questions focused on the workplace.
  - DangitBobby 4mo ago
    I think people vastly overstate the amount of actual risk companies are taking when they engage is possibly illegal behavior, especially on this forum.
    - voakbasda 4mo ago
      Having been on the sidelines for spurious claims of this nature, these sorts of lawsuits are a huge risk: the cost of mounting a defense can easily bankrupt a small business, even if the claims turn out to be baseless. Even in the case of complete innocence, it often becomes a he-said-she-said situation, and the outcome boils down to which side presents the best set of “facts”. I use quotes there because my broader experience with the court system routinely shows that it does not need be burdened by the “truth” or “facts”. That is probably because the regular cast in those venues are literally trained and practiced liars.
      - dmoy 4mo ago
        I think it also depends on how big of a company. If someone (say perhaps, GP) mostly has experience in smaller companies, they might not have had the law of large numbers bring the lawsuit cudgel to bear on their company before. But if you're at a large enough company, you're absolutely getting sued for this from time to time, so you'll have the "how to not get sued" training before you're allowed to interview. (Edit: this isn't limited to interviews. There's many, many examples of things that large companies will not touch due to legal risk, that smaller companies will... either due to lack of knowledge on the legal risk (maybe no legal department even exists yet?) or intentionally as a gamble)
    - nkrisc 4mo ago
      Likely true, and I’m sure many companies go unpunished despite engaging in it, but that doesn’t make it a good idea, and probably the kind of thing that could ruin a small business if they did get caught up in it.
- zdragnar 4mo ago
  Never ever prompt someone to discuss personal relationships in an interview. The moment the conversation drifts into religion, family status, child count, sexuality or gender makeup, or any number of other things, you can easily run afoul of state or federal laws, or open yourself to discrimination lawsuits.
- tetha 4mo ago
  Women in a committed relationship can enter a medical situation that renders then unable to work for 6-9 months, + 2 - 3 years of leave afterwards. Men don't, that's just a month or two twice. It is illegal, and in my book also immoral to deny such a candidate, but the other side of the coin is there.
- gosub100 4mo ago
  Employer fishing to see if the person is married, which will require additional dependents on health insurance. Married is possibly more likely to have kids and take more time off for them or maternity/paternity leave.
like_any_other 4mo ago
Even just an IQ test [1] or teacher licensing test [2,3] opens them to illegal discrimination, so that's not saying much. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. [2] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/black-latino-teachers-collecting-835-million-in-discrimination-lawsuit-11657800508 https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/black-latino-teachers-... [3] https://teachercertification.com/nystce/multi-subject-arts-and-sciences-245/ https://teachercertification.com/nystce/multi-subject-arts-a...
- rad-b 4mo ago
  Working in selection, I can say it’s more nuanced than that. Any measurement can be used as long as it is relevant to the business and related to performance. For example, you’re fine to reject people based on height if you’re hiring basketball players and being higher predicts scoring more points. Or even reject people based on gender (or other protected classes) if you can demonstrate that that specific group is absolutely necessary for you e.g. you want a counselor working with sexual trauma survivors and have evidence that matching patients to counselor on gender gives meaningfully better results for said patients. The specific cases you mention and the finer point is how do you demonstrate the necessity of a measure? Is high general IQ absolutely necessary for SWEs? Or is it enough to have a high logical reasoning, but don’t need spatial? Do you really need high IQ or is it enough to have a lot of practical experience with hands on skills? Do you need higher IQ to do zero to one development vs code maintenance? The devil’s always in the details with these kinds of questions, and it’s definitely not a blanket “you can’t use anything”.
  - like_any_other 4mo ago
    Yeah if you're willing to go into a decade-long court fight then maybe they'll allow you to use a test (where the burden of proof is on the employer to show the test is necessary, i.e. guilty until proven innocent). Or maybe you'll be liable for millions of dollars in compensation. And even something as seemingly reasonable as an IQ test for a knowledge work position is illegal.

ido 4mo ago

Doesn’t that open them to discrimination lawsuits?

olbeefy 4mo ago

At that point, I think I would have just started making things up or telling stories from other people I knew. Some random interviewer has literally no right to be asking me personal questions so I have no problem improvising some fun answers for them.

wolfi1 4mo ago

my father was a turd miner in virginia and his father was a goat ball licker (c) Stephen Colbert

nkrisc 4mo ago

If they’re specifically asking about personal things like that then those are very inappropriate interview questions.

cdud3 4mo ago

Rejecting the question is actually how you pass. Open with "I leave everything private at home when at work hence my answer for the work position is: [here the answer but scoped and formulated to your work life and NOT to your private life]".

nsxwolf 4mo ago
You don't want to pass an interview like that.
- cdud3 4mo ago
  Its an effective way to sort out those candidates who are not able to leave private stuff at home.
  - Dusseldorf 4mo ago
    Also a great way for candidates to filter out employers who play bizarre mind games and think personal trick questions are appropriate in an interview.
    - dpark 4mo ago
      Literally he’s saying to behave inappropriately in a professional interview and see if the candidate plays along. Might as well see if you can get the candidate to offer a bribe or sexual favors for the job since we’re going all in on entrapment.
      - cdud3 4mo ago
        The opposite. Are you breaking the rule to leave your private stuff home just because the other side is or are you capable of keeping out of such sources of interpersonal conflicts, take over and redirect the discussion back to a professional level? Of course it depends for what field and role you apply. For any leading role or customer contact point the capability to stay professional is essential. If you flip burgers at McDonald's then it's your right to be grumpy.

jolmg 4mo ago

Besides the point about separating personal and work life, there's the aspect of having the self-respect to maintain your own privacy. You wouldn't answer deep personal questions from a random stranger on the street. Some questions might've been too invasive to answer were even some family and friends to ask them. Yet, it seems they felt like they should answer some interviewer they just met. It's ultimately the responsibility of the person answering to select what and how much of themselves to share, depending on the relationship. If the interviewer were to ask, "tell me your most embarrassing moment you had while having sex with someone", you wouldn't answer that. If they asked "tell me about the hardest day of your life" and the real, real answer was somehow that time you had that embarrassing moment while having sex with someone, you still wouldn't answer that. You would answer with what you'd be comfortable sharing with the random interviewer, if anything, else you can just decline the question. The "embarrassing sex" is an exaggerated example. You can set your limits differently, in order to not feel > completely emotionally drained as the OP put it. Setting your limits such that your personal life is outside of what your comfortable sharing with the random interviewer would be appropriate. GP comment on separating personal and work life said to imagine they tacked "... at work" at the end. You can also imagine "... that you're comfortable with sharing" as a more general rule.

chaosharmonic 4mo ago

I once had an interviewer ask me, several years back, about the religious affiliations of my college. It's supposed to mean "at work," but that doesn't at all mean that you can assume the interviewer is going to understand that.

overgard 4mo ago

Legally, asking personal questions in an interview that are unrelated to the job is a huge minefield, ie, you could be opening the company to discrimination lawsuits. Huge red flag that the company isn't very professional.

gopher_space 4mo ago
The minefield is enormous but there are only like five or six mines in it and they're all really well marked. It's something adults navigate every day. I don't actually care about personal details, I'm just looking for a topic you can use to explain your point of view for a few minutes.