The driver was a specific person that the company knew. Maybe they were a secret homophobe or something, but you could say that of all the company's employees with just as high a likelihood.
> It's absurd to trust this person like this
If your friend told you "man, my last customer was a jerk" you would distrust that?
A secret homophobe? Who said it was a secret? It's just as likely that it wasn't particularly secret.
If a homophobe was working for HR (in 2022) they would hide it, even to the extent of making sure to hire some percentage gays no matter what they thought personally.
> If your friend told you "man, my last customer was a jerk" you would distrust that?
My personal friend? That's the standard we're expecting from a giant corporation's bureaucracy? It just has its personal friends that it trusts.
That kind of thing is just gross, is my point. Maybe it's how everything works, welcome to the real world, etc. But it's nothing to be praised or admired.
The corporation should vet its "personal friends" at least as closely as its official HR personnel. Otherwise they're an unaccountable source of bias in the hiring process.
Observing how people behave around nominal subordinates is not a new trick or one that is gross. It's an interesting data point. This is unusual as rather than a receptionist or security guard, it is someone who doesn't work for the company.
That you think it's impossible to trust someone without formal vetting is really interesting to me. It suggests that formal vetting by Big Corps is useful but knowing someone from a significant number of interactions/conversations is worthless. I don't buy into that at all, I'd argue pretty strongly the inverse is true and vetting is garbage and interpersonal interactions are useful.
It's not both. Either the taxi driver went through the process of being hired as HR personnel for the corporation, or else they didn't.
> what do you mean when you say "Maybe the powerless person is a homophobe" ?
The taxi driver may cause conflict with gay passengers. Or female passengers, or whatever else. Then they would blame their own victim for their reaction. The taxi driver's personal biases and animosities would become a vector for corporate discrimination.
There is a reason that corporate bureaucracies take such care to look out for this kind of thing. If you let ordinary people just go with their gut on things, you end up excluding a lot of people based on stereotypes and bias. It's not some theoretical possibility, but empirical fact.
The candidate would assume the taxi driver was powerless. I really think you’re reading too much into this. Op didn’t say they gave him veto power over their hiring process. It’s a good asshole test. Imagine some asshole was feeling important and powerful after getting flown out for an interview, and then cursed out a taxi driver because he wasn’t careful enough loading the luggage, or because he wasn’t driving aggressively enough. That’s exactly the kind of person I’d want filtered out.
> cursed out a taxi driver because he wasn’t careful enough loading the luggage
But what if this taxi driver really did toss around the interviewee's expensive luggage, with his best interview clothes and perhaps some materials or documents for an important interview the next day? Does the taxi driver report back, yea he got upset, but it was my fault? What if the interviewee just got off a long flight, wants to rest up for the interview, and isn't really up for chatting with a taxi driver? Does the taxi driver report back that he was rude, wouldn't talk?
I will agree that if the person is a total rageaholic nutcase, passing that info along to the company is valuable information. But reporting on anything else -- asking the driver to keep quiet, requesting he take better care of luggage, asking for a specific route, turning down the radio, whatever -- I'd be more suspicious that the driver is a nuisance than the interviewee has character flaws.
What if the driver actually became a taxi driver so that he could embed himself into the company's hiring process, gave dozens of fair, yet informal candidate reviews, spent years gaining everyone's confidence, all specifically so that one day he could sabotage his arch nemesis' interview by lying and denying him a job!
This subthread is really getting absurd. It's a perfectly good test to hear whether a candidate mistreated someone who they might perceive to be beneath them, and only severely asocial nerds would interpret Op's anecdote as if they put this taxi driver into the CI/CD pipeline to pass/fail candidates.
What's the point of having dedicated personnel, a human resources management division if you will, if an unaccountable outsider has the power to veto the entire hiring process? If you take it a few steps further, why not outsource the entire interview process?
It's an urban legend, a tired old trope of "gotcha!" style human observation that today is commonly used on the bottom-of-the-barrel TV talk shows like Maury Povich. The "absurd" part is that despite the tons of comments here, you haven't realized that yet. Lol.
I really think this whole thread is full of people who would fail the “how did they treat the taxi cab driver / waitress” test and are incensed by the idea that they might be judged by that behaviour.
Violence against homosexuals is pretty common in South and Central America - which is where most of recent American immigrants are from. Here's an example from CNN[1]
"Latin America offers a contradictory narrative: The region has the highest rates of violence against the LGBT community, according to research done by Transgender Europe, a non-governmental organization, but it also has some of the most progressive laws for LGBT equality and protection."
It seems like a pretty intuitive step to me to go from "Highest rate of hate crimes" to "more likely to be homophobic".
Perhaps, but it also seems intuitive to me that people who choose to (/ have the opportunity to) leave a country (i.e. immigrants) may not be representative of that country as a whole.
Even if he was (and he'd be a ridiculous taxi driver if the first thing he did was sharing his political opinions [though that's not unheard of, I've been riding with that kind of service provider]), not immediately going ballistic would be a quality I expect hires to have. No-one needs angry activist mob person joining the team.
We gay people do as a population have cultural "tells" which reveal our sexuality. To a random passerby probably not, but it doesnt take long for shibboleths to come out in a casual conversation.
This actually happened in my workplace, I recognised a coworker as gay long before he told me, just from his vocabulary.
Sure - but are these clue tells likely to come up in what the interviewee considers a chance encounter - riding in a taxi - to a job interview (thus probably dressed in an uniform way), when their mind is likely on other things?
Also, wouldn't the taxi driver also have to know about these clues?
With all respect, I think the scenario "Taxi driver planted/used as an interview prescreen is openly anti-gay and sniffs them out." is a bit contrived.
The "homophobic taxi driver" idea is meant as a representative suggestion of the possibility that the taxi driver may be making judgments in a way that the company doesn't want. That's not to say homophobia is the only or most likely way this could manifest, it's just an illustration.
This story is supposedly about an actual taxi driver, not a plant from HR. It's absurd to trust this person like this.