In many personnel selection processes, aspects that are not of concern to the company are questioned, nor do they affect performance in the position offered. Some of them are even illegal. This article will center on the realization of unlawful questions in a job interview.
The Personnel Selection Process
We live in a world in which the labor market is competitive, and many people are interested in practically any possible job you can create. Thus, when a company needs to fill a vacancy or expand and make that demand visible, it usually receives hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of answers. And in that situation, he must choose between the candidates systematically filtering the opponents, something that has happened for thousands of years.
The selection of personnel is the process through which a company, having defined criteria for the type of worker needed and the required knowledge for the specific position undertakes the task of identifying and choosing the candidate who best aligns with the specified requirements. Different techniques are used, such as psychometric tests that measure the subject’s capacity in certain areas. Another of the main pillars in the selection of personnel is the interview.
In a job interview, a subject belonging to the corporation or company in question or directly interested in hiring a worker establishes an interaction in which they can observe the characteristics or aptitudes of the candidate and assess whether it may be appropriate to the sense goes through a series of questions or even activities.
The functions of the job interview are first to contact the applicant and collect information about their suitability as a candidate in terms of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and attitudes that may be useful in the position offered in question. However, they should limit themselves to that: they should not enter the subject’s personal life unless it is essential to exercise the position.
What are Questions Illegal in a Job Interview?
Sometimes, the questions posed by the interviewer can go beyond these limits and refer to aspects that have nothing to do with the job’s functions or the individual’s skills. These questions are illegal because they violate the right to privacy, in addition to being able to suppose discrimination and exclusion for reasons unrelated to one’s professional competence.
Among the aspects that you should not question are marital status, sexual orientation, the expectations of having physical characteristics or not, the presence of physical or mental illnesses, the race of belonging or nationality, religious or political beliefs, or details of personal life irrelevant to the exercise of the profession examples of situations in which you had to use a required skill, for example.
In this way, questions as frequently as ” Do you want to have children soon? ” or ” Are you married? ” are illegal. You should use different strategies if other aspects are to be evaluated from these questions. Even something innocuous as age is irrelevant (the same does not apply to professional experience).
In addition, these questions can generate a bias that leads to discrimination for ideological reasons, gender, sexual orientation, race, or religion, which is contrary to what is established by law. For this reason, although we can decide to answer them, we also have the option of denying ourselves without having to harm us. It is also possible to file a demand for labor inspection, resulting in a sanction or fine to the company or company in question.
Why do They do Them?
Due to the high prevalence of this type of question, it is legitimate to ask the reason for its realization.
In some cases, they can be done to observe the candidate’s reaction to the question in question. It would help if you considered that it is a selection process and, considering the importance of attitude when carrying out a specific project, observing how a subject behaves when faced with a strange situation or an uncomfortable or unexpected question can serve to elicit the way of thinking and acting in the face of pressure or surprise.
As written in an article on Coursework help online, in these cases, the response’s content is not relevant, but what would be assessed would be how the candidate answers it or even how it is not responded to. That does not mean that it remains an illegal question.
However, on most occasions, these types of questions are intended to obtain direct information regarding a person’s life to predict their productivity. For example, suppose a woman is pregnant or plans to have children shortly. In that case, the company may think it is better to hire someone without such plans, avoid maternity leave, or find possible substitutes.
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