We were interviewing for a senior operational manager recently and a bunch of my staff settled on one candidate. I usually have them filter down a pool of candidates to a few before I talk to them, just to be more efficient. Anyway, I interviewed the top pick recently and wasn’t too impressed. I asked him about how to handle situations where the customer might not be too happy, for example. He just said that those situations shouldn’t happen since you should always make the customer happy. While that sounds good, it’s not very realistic and worried me.
In any case, I asked my HR manager about it and she shut the door to my office and began to tell me in a characteristically matter of fact way that we shouldn’t hire him because he was over 35 and unmarried. I was then informed that if a woman in China is 35 and unmarried that’s her business, but if a man is 35 and unmarried, he’s got to be a total loser. Either he’s a dismal failure in his professional life or a complete social incompetent. What if he’s very shy, star-crossed or maybe had bad luck?, I asked. No, in China even the bashful and unlucky will have plenty of options if they’ve got their act together, particularly in a big city like Shanghai, which she believes has many more available women than men. Why should a global company like ours hire someone so patently inadequate?, she asked.
The HR conversations here are really crazy some times. There are plenty of times when people say things that are so insanely un-PC or clearly biased that simply having said the thing about a person in the US during an interviewing process would almost force you to make them a job offer.
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