"Oh, this is (candidate), but let me save us some time. I thought this was going to be a technical interview."
That guy bombed the interview right then and there. I didn't tell him that, though. I let him dig the deepest hole he could imagine by doing my best ditzy/derpy voice and just saying things like "they want me to ask about the load... average...?". He'd make up some garbage, and I'd log all of it. This way I could bury him both for being a sexist bastard and for being a lying piece of trash at the same time.
He has already sunk the interview in her eyes, but she doesn't want to tell her employer that this guy bombed due to his interactions in the first 30 seconds with her.
Moreover, he is a sexist bastard.
He then tells her something she disagrees technically about load average, and this makes him a lying piece of trash.
Regardless, he has bombed and sunk the interview, and her only duty now is to spend another 44:30 seconds to bury him.
Of course, she is playing this for humor, so I am out of line for thinking Rachel sounds like a jackass who has done a disservice to the candidate as well as a disservice to her employer.
So the sexist guy has an incorrect opinion on women in tech. He encounters one, who decides to play along with his stereotype rather than just be who she is. While it's not her responsibility to teach him not to be sexist, it's also specifically avoiding allowing him to see a positive role model. And all out of a vindictive power play. If he has 'already lost the interview', then there is no point in keeping up with the charade - you've already made your evaluation and now you're just being a cat playing with a mouse.
And at the end of the interview, we are left with a sexist man who has had his preconceived notions confirmed by encountering a female tech. That's something of an own-goal.
Wow, so Rachel encounters a sexist jerk, and then asks him a number of questions to let him hang himself, and it is Rachel who is the problem?
Given they have very few women interviewers, and the guy has to work in a team, any woman who has the unfortunate luck to work in the jerk's team is going to have their life made difficult. Rachel seems to have done a service to the company by flunking him, IMHO.
That's a good strawman fallacy you've got going there. It's pretty clear that I think the main problem is the sexist man.
Rachel didn't 'ask him a number of questions', she purposefully played the role of a ditzy, clueless airhead to play to his stereotypes rather than just ask the questions straight. Sure, it might feel good at the time and we can all laugh at the guy, ha ha, but what actually happened was the guy got reinforcement for his shitty behaviour. If the guy was giving weak answers, then being a straight interviewer isn't going to suddenly make him Einstein.
You're assuming there can only be one problem. Aside from being dishonest, carrying on a charade for an hour is a huge avoidable waste of time for everyone involved.
At large company, it's too much trouble to end the interview early. I ended an technical phone screen after five minutes, when I found a senior rails candidate had fudged his employment history and couldn't tell me anything useful about rails.
I had to spend the next half hour talking with recruiting and hr about this guy's claims of me verbally abusing him. They probably gave him another phone screen just to CYA.
Also, it's useful to gather evidence, because some hiring manager who has three more headcount to fill in the next two months before his performance review is going to wonder loudly if it was really sexism, or if we threw out a sterling resume over a misunderstanding.
What if he has impressed everyone else in the process so far? Maybe he's very personable when talking to men, or other interviewers happened to not ask questions that would have revealed skill deficiencies.
If they want to hire him, saying he made a sexist comment might not prevent the hire. "Maybe he's not that bad." But if you have a couple of comments he made, and can show that he isn't technically proficient (or merely average) then you have evidence other people can use to make a good decision.
There are two reasons for not just stopping the interview.
One is the corporate image that the company tries to project.
The other is that upset interviewees in the US occasionally develop theories about why they might have been discriminated against. And their mis-memories about what was said can figure into that. No matter how far off base, the lawsuits are expensive, and the truth does not always win you the case.
Therefore every competent HR person and anyone with experience in this part of the law will tell you that you never give anything away about why someone failed the interview.
