Company is playing psychological mind games with interviewees. Is this ethical? Should I report this to someone?

Question

I'm a junior tech consultant at a tech consulting firm. I just recently joined the interviewing group and I learned that they analyze everything about candidates and plenty of interactions are a psychological mind game.

1. When I interviewed, there was a guy struggling with a large box outside the front door. That was part of the assessment. You failed that test if you didn't hold the door and only got 50% if you merely held the door for him rather than helping with the box. They still do that to judge "situational awareness and ability to help." The actual trick here varies, but it is some version of expecting the candidate to help.

2. The secretary at the front desk (Whichever one signs them in) gets asked her opinion of every candidate.

3. For senior level positions, they will have one of the custodians or chefs bump into them and check their reaction. People fail if they get angry and calling them stupid is an automatically disqualifies type of thing.

4. Sometimes the interview will start a bit late. Candidates are judged on how they react to this.

More than half the assessment document is stuff not in the interview itself. None of these things are relevant to the job so I think they are unfair to be assessed especially since the candidates would be stressed and not on top of their social game. None of the candidates would know any of those are tests rather than just random interactions.

Is this ethical? Is there someone I should report this to? I live in Canada.

Answer 1

None of these things are relevant to the job

They are all relevant to evaluating cultural fit. Test #3 especially seems to be looking for people who are jerks. #1 and #2 fall into this as well and potentially #4, although you don't give many details and might fall into professional skills.

would be stressed and not on top of their social game.

Firstly, if you fall apart and are rude under stress, a consulting gig is probably not suitable for you.

Second, not yelling is not a "social game" element. I generally view visible anger as unprofessional, but others might allow for that. It is only in certain industries where yelling at someone for a mistake is considered acceptable (and usually because it is a highly paid profession like law, so nobody feels much sympathy or a relatively low-status profession nobody gives a thought about).

Consider what you would want in co-workers or your managers.

Would you really want to work with a person who did not pass all these tests?

Answer 2

I think a couple of these have problems, but not for the reason stated in the question.

I would argue that unless the position actually requires being able to bend over and lift heavy objects, intentionally screening out candidates with bad backs, knees, joints, etc. could be seen as discriminatory. I think it's worth pointing out that it won't be obvious that someone can't help with the box and that you shouldn't be penalizing someone for having an invisible impairment. (Of course, that may actually be the point.)

It's been pointed out in the comments that there are potential insurance (who is responsible if the candidate is injured lifting the box) and security issues (should the candidate assume the stranger should have access to the building) with this test as well.

There's a couple of problems with number 3:

• An interview shouldn't involve pain or injury, period. It only being a "light" bump isn't an excuse: you don't know if the candidate bruises easily, already has an existing injury where they got bumped, etc.

• Someone bumping into you on purpose is not the same thing as someone bumping into you on accident. While the candidate still shouldn't blow their top, it's not reasonable to expect someone to not even be mildly upset that someone clearly bumped into them on purpose. (And it's going to be obvious if the candidate tried to avoid the collision.)

There are better ways of finding out how someone deals with a low-level employee making a mistake that don't require potentially hurting someone or the candidate realizing it was deliberate.

I think the other two are OK.

Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of tests you don't know you're taking or a test where the rules aren't clear but "Be polite to reception" isn't one. Being polite to everyone is a reasonable expectation, not a test. From what I've read, asking receptionists/secretaries their opinion is pretty common. Unfortunately, some people to feel like they can get away with being rude to folks who work at the front desk and many companies don't want to hire people like that.

They do risk having a good candidate think they aren't being respectful of their time by being late but as long as it's not more than 15 minutes and it only happens once, they should be OK. Of course, if things generally run late in your workplace then it's good for the candidate to know that.

Answer 3

From my perspective that sounds like a wonderful company to work in. If the rest of the business practices are as well thought out at least.

In my experience, a lot of companies fail to do proper evaluation of their candidates early on, and that creates a lot of problems down the road. That is one of the reasons why the Joel Test has the question "Do new candidates write code during their interview?" in it. Apart from making the business run better, it will probably also make the workplace much nicer for you as you will have collages who fit the company culture better.

Also, all the things you listed are directly relevant to almost any job. More so to a job in a consulting firm!

When I interviewed, there was a guy struggling with a large box outside the front door. That was part of the assessment.

If you are looking for people that do not have the "that´s not my responsibility" kind of attitude and help where needed, probably a good idea. Edit: I also don´t think this is necessarily a discrimination of people with disabilities. OP does not state you have to carry the box yourself. You can still show awareness for example ask if they need help and if you should try am get someone, as you cant do heavy lifting yourself etc.

The secretary at the front desk (Whichever one signs them in) gets asked her opinion of every candidate.

That is great in my eyes. First, you will probably encounter a lot of front desk secretaries as a consultant, as your first impression with the client. It better be a good one. Second, this is a hint to me that the company values its employees opinions and not just regard them as worker bees. *Edit because of comments: I do not get where y

For senior level positions, they will have one of the custodians or chefs bump into them and check their reaction. People fail if they get angry and calling them stupid is an automatically disqualifies type of thing.

Also great. Ever had a superior shouting at you? Not great leadership. You don´t want to hire those! Edit: Depending how it is performed, maybe a bit risky though. You should not risk hurting someone!

Sometimes the interview will start a bit late. Candidates are judged on how they react to this.

This will also be a pretty common experience when you are at a customer as a consultant. Makes sense to test if you can behave in a situation that will be fairly regular in your future!

More than half the assessment document is stuff not in the interview itself. None of these things are relevant to the job so I think they are unfair to be assessed especially since the candidates would be stressed and not on top of their social game. None of the candidates would know any of those are tests rather than just random interactions.

Is this ethical? Is there someone I should report this to? I live in Canada.

In my eyes it´s fine. It should be normal and expected in an interview to be judged on a lot more than your actual technical skills and it should be no secret to anyone that soft skills are just as important technical excellence to form a good and productive team. Nothing in your example shows any discrimination, nothing seems creepy like in some other questions where the employer seems to try to peek into the private life of the candidate.

To me all you listed speaks of a boss who knows exactly what he is looking for in his company and who thought of some clever ways to find it out early on. Saves the company and the candidate the hassle of discovering a bad fit later!

Answer 4

TL;DR: I don’t think what you’re describing is unethical,^* but it’s deeply, deeply misguided. (Moreover, if the people doing it understood how misguided it was and kept doing it, then we might reasonably say they are behaving unethically.)

^*Edit: I won’t address the issue of discrimination based on disabilities discussed in other answers. That issue is of course ethically problematic, but this answer covers a different angle.

Long answer:

The issue is that the signal being sampled under such “secret test” conditions is so random and noisy that it is effectively useless. The people at your firm are operating on the premise that there is a strong statistical correlation between whether a job candidate helps a guy carry a box and the general workplace attitude of that candidate later on if they ended up being hired. But that premise is not just wrong but completely, laughably wrong. There are simply too many confounding factors that will end up completey drowning this weak signal in random noise. E.g., suppose the candidate is in a hurry because they have to go to the bathroom and/or want to have time to meditate a bit to calm their nerves before their interview? Suppose they just remembered that they need to text their wife/husband to remind them about an errand involving their child? Suppose they were looking at their phone to check the room number for the interview while entering the building and were too absent minded to notice the person with the box? Suppose a million other things that will completey overwhelm your ability to deduce any meaningful thing from this trivial non-event. “Situational awareness”? Give me a break. Unless you’re recruiting an airplane pilot or a Navy Seal, the term does not apply.

The other secret tests you’re describing are similarly flawed. Asking the secretaries what they thought based on a momentary interaction might be reasonable, but to give that a large weight in a hiring decision is utter madness.

To conclude, I think it’s worth considering that as a general rule, hiring decisions based on a short job interview are already based on very superficial information that is subject to the same statistical noise I described above, except that in a normal interview one is at least trying to collect information in a reasoned, systematic way, which significantly increases the signal-to-noise ratio. Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman has written a lot about the “illusion of validity” (a term he and Amos Tversky coined) that leads people to form very vivid, strongly-held opinions based on essentially random noise. In an article that should be required reading for anyone who interviews job candidates, he describes experiencing this himself, and how even knowing that this was the case after being confronted with the inefficacy of his past predictions did nothing to dispel the illusion:

The dismal truth about the quality of our predictions had no effect whatsoever on how we evaluated new candidates and very little effect on the confidence we had in our judgments and predictions.

I thought that what was happening to us was remarkable. The statistical evidence of our failure should have shaken our confidence in our judgments of particular candidates, but it did not. It should also have caused us to moderate our predictions, but it did not. We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses, but we continued to feel and act as if each particular prediction was valid.

If this is the result of someone observing a group of people for an entire day (as Kahneman describes doing in the article I quoted from), imagine just how much more random would be the conclusions drawn from the ridiculously small number of observations in the secret test described in your question.

Bottom line: the people at your firm are essentially hiring people based on a coin toss. You can draw your own conclusions about whether that’s unethical.

Answer 5

The truth comes out in the unexpected, the unrehearsed, the unlucky event.

Maybe some political board detached from reality may think it is unethical to test people on their reaction to unannounced tests, but these are the most honest answers the candidate can give.

If you are only at your best when you know you are being tested/interviewed, the right company to get good work out of you is one that puts you under constant surveillance. I'd rather work at a company that knows that people are at their best (performance as well as manner-wise) even when they are not under surveillance.

Answer 6

I'll restrict my answer to what has not been mentioned:

Test 1.a might be discriminatory, and test 1.b definitely is. If someone has any kind of invisible disability, they may fail to hold the door and almost certainly will not help lift the box. Yes, you do want a candidate that will help someone in need, but for a non-physical job, I don't think you want to filter out a guy that has back pain or broke his hand a month ago. It may be illegal if that filtering correlates with any protected group (and it may correlate with age, sex, or disability).

Answer 7

The intent of these psychological tests may be fair but I would be concerned about the interpretation of the candidates' reactions by the interviewers. The interpretation will be quite culturally based. Most of us will be surprised when bumped. Does that mean we are angry? Mostly not. But will we be interpreted as having become angry? Quite possibly - and that's not an equitable approach to evaluating candidates.

Answer 8

Report this to the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Some of the other answers have explained why some of these tests would be discriminatory against individuals with disabilities. I'm going to answer the second part of your question: who to report this to, and how to do so.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission describes the process for the resolution of discrimination complaints on its website; it says that the first step occurs when an individual files a discrimination complaint. In order to do so, their How to file a complaint page details the information that they require for a complaint to be heard:

What We Need to Know

• The specific ground(s) of discrimination (race, sex, disability, religion, etc.)
• A detailed description of what happened (how were you discriminated against)
• The negative effect this act or treatment has had on you.

What You Need to Know

• You should file a complaint within 12 months of the act or treatment that you are complaining about. The Commission does make exceptions.
• You can file a complaint on behalf of others as long as you have their consent.
• You don’t need to pay a fee to file a complaint.
• You don't need to hire a lawyer or get other legal assistance. However, if you decide to hire legal help, you are responsible for paying the associated costs.
• You can call the Commission and ask for help.
• The Commission is impartial and it does not take your side or the respondent's.

The page for actually filing a discrimination complaint can be found here.

Answer 9

1. Suppose that the company you are working in didn't do these things on purpose to assess the candidate's reaction in all of these situations, but such situations truly occured. Would you feel it as unethical if the company rejected an applicant that behaved poorly on these situations? These things (and these causes of rejection) happen all the time. Most usually the sentiment of failing over them is not that of getting unfair treatment but that of just having bad luck.
2. Secretaries confront daily all kinds of people and most times their experience in quick-judging a person is greater than that of perople in other professions. So consulting them has indeed a point. After all, these secretaries will have at some part to do work for the applicant (if hired).
3. I am sure you must have noticed companies speaking about morale, team spirit etc. These things can't be counted, nor can the applicant prove whether he/she truly acknowledges them. But sometimes they are very important, even more important than the technical aspects of a job hire (whether one has that skill or another). After all skills can be learned, being a nice person is something pertaining to our personality and though not static, it's certainly harder to be altered. So yes, if a company truly regards these aspects as important, then they have a right to find a way to check on them, provided this way is not offending or illegal, which in the particular case doesn't seem to be.

Answer 10

These tests all have a lot of problems that can get the company in legal problems except for the second one.

The first test runs into the problem that they don't know what conditions the person may have that would prevent them from lifting over a certain amount of weight which would prevent them from helping someone with a potentially heavy package. Not to mention if they are distracted by getting prepared for the interview they may not notice it or assume that it would be the job of the secretary or an actual employee.

The second test is fine as it is just asking for an opinion

The third test can be classified as assault and depending on the personality of the person in question it can trigger a bad reaction. Depending on how the person reacts or why they react it could result in the company regretting the test.

The final test is just plain rude as there is a good possibility that the candidate has to be somewhere else after the interview with this company, either going back to where they work currently or to another interview. While you might say it is a way to judge when things don't go on time it also shows bad faith by purposely not starting on time when you could.

Answer 11

No, none of this is unethical.

No, there is no one to “report this to.”

As a junior, maybe instead of jumping to conclusions you use this opportunity to ask and learn from your seniors instead of going right to “report this!”. Maybe they should add a psychological test for that too.

Answer 12

All I gotta say is ... "I wouldn't want to work there." And, I wouldn't.

I don't play games with my employers, and I'm not employed (for long) by any who play games with me.

I once was in for a programming-job interview when one of the interviewees asked a brain-teaser question (unrelated to the job) and the others abruptly seemed to be play-acting. I never quite figured out what they were on about, but I just smiled, rose to my feet, and said: "Gentlemen, I withdraw my application." And I walked out. Politely. But, quickly.