But how do you tell? It's not the 1950s any more. Prejudice doesn't manifest itself openly, with people saying, "Oh yeah, there's no way that a darkie would be

But how do you tell? It's not the 1950s any more. Prejudice doesn't manifest itself openly, with people saying, "Oh yeah, there's no way that a darkie would be able to understand this work," or, "Yeah, we can't hire her because she'll get married and pregnant." These days, prejudice manifests itself far more subtly. It's a sense of discomfort that people get when they're seated across the table from someone who's different from them. It's questions that are more difficult, or answers that are more harshly judged. It's a matter of choosing which comments to focus on and which ones to let slide. I think that instead of looking for positive "culture fit" (which just seems to encourage every interviewer to judge the candidate by whatever subconscious prejudices they have) we need to enforce "no assholes." In other words, we should flip the burden of proof. Instead of requiring the candidate to demonstrate that they are a culture fit, we need to have the interviewer demonstrate that the culture fit isn't there. In the debrief, when one of the interviewers says that the candidate was not a culture fit, I would ask them to back up that statement with specific statements or behaviors that the candidate exhibited in the interview. I think that would do a lot to counter our unconscious predilection to look favorably on people just like us and harshly on people who aren't