A manager’s rant about young workers exposes a damaging hiring mistake: judging candidates by generational stereotypes instead of their qualifications.
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Short of someone lighting their own pants on fire, you do not need to yell at a job candidate.
It doesn’t matter how stupid the candidate is or how poorly the interview is going. Yelling is not necessary, and that was the first thing I noticed in this post at r/recruitinghell. The OP, lollylaffylarry03, shared a story of a job interview where the interviewer screamed at the OP “for basically no reason lol.”
And that’s enough to condemn the hiring manager, but there is a bigger lesson in this job interview gone wild. The OP writes:
“This was the second round interview for a job I was trying to land, and one of the interviewers raised his voice at me not long after my self-introduction, went on a 20-something minute lecture on “young people don’t know…” and “professionalism” (ironic, coming from the guy shouting at me).”
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This is what discrimination looks like.
Discrimination is all about assumptions
The interviewer jumped in and began attacking the OP based on the interviewer’s assumptions about the group OP belonged to (young people) rather than looking at OPs qualifications and asking questions regarding that.
Now, to be clear, age discrimination (from a U.S. federal perspective; your state may vary) is only illegal for people over 40. So this type of discrimination may have been legal. But legal doesn’t mean good or honorable.