Case interviewing is classist and sexist
Apr 10
85 Comments
Companies require case interviews if they want to hire more white guys. Discuss. Case interviews seem more like an elitist gatekeeping practice than any real assessment of strategic ability and creative thinking.
https://hbr.org/2020/01/what-top-consulting-firms-gets-wrong-about-hiring
What Top Consulting Firms Get Wrong About Hiring
Harvard Business Review
comments
I think interviewing in general can be very biased: for example; what is the difference between deciding a candidate “is curious” (a positive) vs “unstructured” (a negative) in their thinking. I’ve seen strong candidates at several companies I’ve worked for get passed over for poor comms (highly correlated to ESL) or just general demeanor. People hire people that are like them, behaviorally and in terms of demeanor, and sometimes race and gender.
Fun note, I worked at an internal consulting group for a while and it was heavily stacked with affluent white people from private schools. One girl I worked with literally didn’t know that public libraries were free. But she could crush a case. You get what you test for.
The issue is that poor black folks for example (since I’m a black dude from a poor family) don’t even know anything about anything. And that sets you up for failure. Looking back there’s a ton of stuff that could have made my life easier. Like I’m an engineer. My mom and dad didn’t even know what an engineer is. As a kid our options for stuff we knew about in the hood we grew up in was literally just rap, athletics, going to college as a nebulous thing (since not many of us had went), lawyer and doctor. That’s it. If I had known what I know now. I would have went to a community college and learned cs then applied to a state school and finished it up.
Something as simple as that wasn’t even known in my community.
And that’s the missing factor. Backgrounds where it’s not the violence or the drugs that set you up for failure the most. Is the lack of knowing basic things due to systemic redlining and racism that screwed over my grand parents generation and set my parents for failure.
When people say my grandparents were setback because of this or because of that it just shows the victim mentality. Many whites and other minorities got f***d around the world for being poor. Slavery didn't exist only in the US, but it existed in a lot of places back in the '70s and the eighties in the Middle East in parts of Africa and I bet in other countries.
And if you think about it slavery or "being a serf" existed for hundreds if not thousands of years around the world, and people still grow out of this shit. I even bet did bunch of people today can claim that their grandparents back in Europe were probably serves of another lord in their country.
And if we go back as far as our grandparents generation, look in Germany and the rest of Europe. Most of the cities in Europe were totally destroyed, but if you look at them today you would not say there it World War in that region. People and countries massively rebuild the destruction. So people will actually want to do something with their lives do it regardless of anything. People make the conscious decision to stay in the hood instead of getting out getting education or even an understanding about the world and succeed in life.
Also something to consider, maybe being a white male born in the USA is "privileged", but in a lot of countries around the world they're just one white dude of the pack. And when they come to this country, they don't really understand how their skin makes them privileged...
It's fucking sad.