A few years ago, I had some great email exchanges about a position. I was an experienced dev, and I knew what they were looking for. But to make it official, I had to go through their HR person.
This was the first time I was going to talk to someone from the company, live in a video call.
And the moment we jumped on a call, her first words were, "Do you have a green card?"
I was born here. One look at my skin color and that was her question.
I have friend who told me that his father speaks broken english to non-native speakers. If they hire landscapers, for example, he'll start mimicking a hispanic accent and dropping words and deliberately changing grammar. His entire family is terribly embarrassed by this behavior, even if he means well. What a tool.
As we've been told since at least the early nineties: if a non-native english speaker can't understand you, just repeat yourself and ASK LOUDER. /s
I used to work in HR. In my first week, the HR Manager walked around with me on the floor of our factory. We had a lot of Vietnamese employees. She wanted me to start learning people's names, but the first time we encountered a Viet person she whispered to me "hey, between you and me, I can't really tell them apart since they all look similar and have similar names, so if you can't remember them then it's no biggie". Like what??? Ma'am you are the HR manager.
It's not a valid question at all. "Are you legally able to work in the United States" has been a question on literally every single job application I've ever filled out. There's zero valid reasons for the interviewer to not know the answer already, and even less than zero valid reasons for them to phrase the question the way they did.
It’s not only not a valid question, it might not even be a legal question.
I’m a hiring manager for a very large tech company in California. I cannot ask any questions about age, ethnicity, country of origin, citizenship status, veteran status, marital status, health, and so on.
HR can ask if they’re eligible to work in the US, and I can ask whether they have the skills and talents I need for the position, but it’s tightly limited.
It still crops up all the time. There are decades worth of studies showing how having a non-white looking name or having age indicators present in work history or graduation dates influence reviewers to reject applications they’d otherwise accept.
Yeah, but they always ask about "citizenship or ability to legally work in the US" on applications. If it was a white person, they wouldn't have said anything. If the candidate were white, and they answered "no" on the form, they would've just not been moved forward in the hiring process. They wouldn't have gotten to that point and still been asked.
You can’t ask that question because immigration status is a protected class. It’s up to the candidate to provide appropriate documentation at the time of hire
I mean you're getting g downvoted, but I'm painfully white and in the UK. Every job interview either the first or second question I get asked is "do you have the right to work in the UK?" Or "do you need a visa to work in the UK?"
Very clearly the ad was run including requirements that were supposed to be known only to the recruiter.
Remember this next time someone tells you there is no justification for affirmative action programs.
Only a sloppy (or maliciously compliant) person responsible for committing the ad copy exposed this for what it was. Had they done their job as intended, there would have been no evidence of these racist hiring practices.
And now all the non-bigots know that they don't want to work for (checks notes) Arthur Grand Technologies Inc. based in Loudoun County, Virginia.
I certainly hope that when searching for this company, top google search results will show that Arthur Grand Technologies Inc. based in Loudoun County, Virginia was fined by the justice department for seeking to hire whites only, at the exclusion of non-whites and those born outside the US.
It’s also probably worth the Department of Labor’s time to investigate their previous hiring practices. When every single employee ends up being white, the DOL will likely be able to come down on them with even bigger fines. Because proving discrimination often requires a pattern, but an all-white payroll would be a nice shiny pattern for the DOL to grab onto and parade around in court.
This also may have been a targeting instruction accidentally posted in the ad.
After all, with contemporary targeting knowing everything about everyone it should be easy to only show that to, e.g. straight white cis male US citizens of 34.4 years old with 2.2 male children
The job posting by Ashburn-based Arthur Grand Technologies Inc. was published in March 2023 and said that the company was only looking for “U.S. Born Citizens [white] who are local within 60 miles from Dallas, TX [Don’t share with candidates],” according to a Justice Department news release.
I'm telling you, these job replies from HR have gotten pretty cryptic, but I send out what they tell me to send. It's not my job to understand, just to send the emails.
"Dear [Candidate],
We regret to inform you that [Company Name] is no longer hiring for the position of [job title]. Thank you for your interest in [Company Name].
It looks like the line that was included in the job posting was not meant to be published, but was an instruction for the recruiter:
“U.S. Born Citizens [white] who are local within 60 miles from Dallas, TX [Don’t share with candidates],”
If the company hadn't been too cheap to hire local, US born, white, racist citizens to handle the job posting, they might have been able to continue being scummy without anyone being able to prove it.
There are multiple “consulting” agencies in the US that have gotten in trouble for not hiring anyone aside from south Asians. If this job was posted by someone in India, there is probably a non-zero chance they were hiring this “white” only person because they were trying to offset the fact that they only hire south Asians otherwise.
Oh! Now I understand why my English teacher was a total fascist when it came to those kinds of pronunciations! Pen-guin got us a fair few times. Neat. She was just extra racist.