interviewed great candidate

[Zoe Girl]

I am so excited! I interviewed someone yesterday and love her. She has experience in this age range, already has FA/CPR, has done lesson planning, had great answers with my questions about working with a team. She is a Program Leader, not staff aide which is great in so many ways. I tried to interview her earlier in the year but she was pregnant so she contacted me when her baby was 2 months old and she was ready to work. Her kids go to a DPS school that my friend supervises and her sister actually works there. I got good feedback on the sister as well. She was dressed nicely with a fashionable head scarf. That is not uncommon among black women I know. As part of the conversation I asked if she was interested in summer and she is and said she had a week long religious holiday one week. I noted that and said it would not be a problem. From that I figured out that she is Muslim.

So I told the team about her and that I was going forward with the hiring process. My one new staff is interesting. She is very open and honest and struggling with some things (like language, omg, need another talk). She said she might have a problem, she doesn't want to have a problem but she wanted to be honest. It brought up a very important conversation, but frustrating to me. And some memories, I worked at the Rec Center on campus in college. A lot of grad students came from all over the world and brought families with them. So we wanted to serve the needs of the community and put together and specific exercise class for traditional Muslim women. Yeah there was some conflict on it but basically it was customer service and it was successful. That was 30 years ago! Meanwhile I know this staff has a lot of other influences, she is 60-ish, her husband and neighbors are conservative, she was raised in orphanages and was homeless as a teen. I am glad she is telling me this, but I also am a little 'mama-bear' protective to my staff and families. So I need to see how I can support her but my primary job is to bring in this qualified staff successfully. I can't exactly pretend this world is not paying VERY close attention to people and their race, religion, etc. after all.

[iris lilies]

In that situation I would not have asked if anyone has a problem with your potential new employee who is Muslim.

I always think that if we treat our employees as rational adults who need no special "support" for normal working conditions, they will rise to the occasion and perform like rational adults in normal working conditions.

I think that by having the conversation you had with her, you

1) signalled that there IS something wrong with your potential Muslim employee
2) invited her to focus on something that is not productive and that does not advances your work
3) flew your own virtue flag

And what is with the "60-ish" ageism dissing?

[Zoe Girl]

Yeah I don't think I was flying a virtue flag however I chat and I am very interested in people so it came out like that for me. Also our work has been spending a lot of time working on culture. I would have said things about other people I learned in the interview that were interesting to get to know the person. I am very up-front, I talk about anything that is open like our 6 yo kid who is not sure of her gender and the kids who are adopted and the families who have close cultural ties to other countries and how religion is active in our lives as it affects work and everything else. I know that a question we deal with is teaching/celebrating holidays with kids at work. When I get a new set of staff for winter break we have the Christmas conversation every year, and I know my new person is from a school that the community requested no holidays because of the diversity. So it really was in that context.

Actually I talked to this staff last night about another thing and now she is worried that the new staff has great qualifications and will think she is no good at her job, she also thinks she is going to get fired so we talked about that she will not get surprised if she is doing a bad job. She is pretty nervous in this new work.

I think age is one part of a person and as I get to know someone to make them a part of the team that can be part of it. So it means she is not likely to be on her phone all the time! How age can affect our work (not negatively but something as a trainer) is that we are asking people to work with kids in a way that is significantly different than the way we were raised or how we raised our kids in most cases. Unless you were a hippy this is new to most people over 40 or 50. Moving from 'because I said so' in some people's history to 'here are the choices and consequences' and developing our rules with the kids is a change. We also have cultural conversations about how we were raised among my colleagues and bring that into training. I have had some great conversations in my mindfulness training with a woman who used to push my buttons. She was finding her style (self described as black matriarch) was not working at her school with the kids and staff. So she has learned about the cultures she works with and we have learned more about her. I shared how my mid-western family does not do direct communication very much, we are supposed to understand things other ways. All these styles work but when you put it all together we need to be clear and have open communication in a way that does not judge but learns.

[Tybee]

Zoe, I think your reply to IL, that last paragraph, is really full of ageism. I would be so offended if you were interviewing me and you were saying these things. You really are making some ageist assumptions, and acting on them, and I think that is not good. This is particularly offensive:
"Unless you were a hippy this is new to most people over 40 or 50. Moving from 'because I said so' in some people's history to 'here are the choices and consequences' and developing our rules with the kids is a change."

And isn't it illegal to ask people about their religion, and then start making hiring decisions based on religion?

[herbgeek]

I am 56 and I have NEVER used "because I say so" as a style. It annoyed me as a kid that adults couldn't actually come up with a rationale, and so I've never done it. And I see plenty of older people on their phone all the time.

This is just an offensive as someone my age talking about those "darn millenials and their need for constant validation".

[Zoe Girl]

I want to be clear, her religion has nothing to do with my hiring decision. It is 100% on the qualifications she brings and how well I think she will fit with the team.

I can see that it sounds like ageism, I am actually in the age range that I am talking about if that matters. Maybe I should focus on how it is challenging for people with a background in more authoritarian parenting and educational systems to learn a new way to do things. That is really what it is, but I have found that when I actually address it directly then it is much easier to talk about. It is also based on over 6 years and about 13 school sites/summer camps that I have supervised and trained. There are 2 trainings specifically, Ask-Listen-Encourage and Structure and Clear Limits, that bring up these topics. At first it surprised me because I am the hippy parent, I raised my kids with a different style (and I heard a lot of crap about it). So the training was wonderful and brought clarity to what I had already been doing. However to tell someone else that you start off the school year by sitting the kids down and creating rules together can be really new, at least that is what I heard from my staff when I trained them to do that. So I started asking questions and what I heard fit what I said above, from lots of people across many differences.

I think it is totally ageist to say 'a person of this age can't learn or adjust', but I feel I am saying 'different generations were raised different ways and knowing that is part of providing the personal training and support I need to do as a supervisor'.

[Zoe Girl]

I am 56 and I have NEVER used "because I say so" as a style. It annoyed me as a kid that adults couldn't actually come up with a rationale, and so I've never done it. And I see plenty of older people on their phone all the time.

This is just an offensive as someone my age talking about those "darn millenials and their need for constant validation".

Sorry, I am about your age also and was raised hearing that but did not raise my kids that way, I explained a bit more above. I have staff who struggle because they say that they told the kids something and the kids did not automatically do it. They think they are doing their job wrong, and many times I have heard that they were told that themselves. So I wait until I hear something like that and respond when I am working with staff.

argh, on-line communication!

[Tybee]

It actually does not matter that you are in the age range that you are generalizing about. It doesn't change the fact that you are using age as a hiring decision by making assumptions about age and how people in a certain age range think. Stating that you are an exception because you are a "hippy" just perpetuates the ageist stereotyping. It also makes me think that you have internalized the ageism that we see around us every day.

Similarly, assumptions that "younger" people will be on their phones all the time is ageist thinking.

That is the way I interpret your comments, and try to think about it from the point of view of the job applicants you are seeing. How would you feel if someone were saying, "well, she's 50 but she's a hippy so I guess I'll give her a chance" or "she's a Buddhist but if Mary, Bob, and Mike can stand being around a Buddhist, I guess I can hire her."

Try putting yourself in the place of the people you are interviewing, and see what that feels like.

[rosarugosa]

I'm not seeing ageism here. In my office, I have the only team with all the generations of the workforce from Boomers to Generation Z. And there are differences among us and we talk about them in an open and non-judgmental way (the rest of the dept is composed of almost all millennials).
ZG didn't ask candidate about her religion. Candidate offered that she had a week-longer religious holiday in the summer and she wore a headscarf so ZG assumed she was Muslim, which sounds like a pretty logical assumption to me.

[Zoe Girl]

Thank you Rosa! This has been actually stressing me out, go figure. I really wanted to express how great it is that we have open conversations, that my work and department supports how I work, and I love being able to talk about things that can affect how we work with kids.

[JaneV2.0]

I'm often skeptical of fads in education, which plays right into the "old thinking" stereotype. Like working in groups, which was almost universally hated among my classmates back in the 90s. I'm glad I missed most of that in school and in the workforce.

[iris lilies]

I'm often skeptical of fads in education, which plays right into the "old thinking" stereotype. Like working in groups, which was almost universally hated among my classmates back in the 90s. I'm glad I missed most of that in school and in the workforce.
The contestents of Project Runway absolutely hate the challanges where they have to work in groups. They all groan when that assignement comes up.

[rosarugosa]

But so much of the real-world workplace requires one to be able to work well in groups. I too prefer to go off on my own and do a project, but I lead a team and work in a strong team environment. I'm almost always pleasantly surprised at the synergy we get from different perspectives, even while simultaneously being frustrated by the painful process of bringing a group to consensus.

[iris lilies]

But so much of the real-world workplace requires one to be able to work well in groups. I too prefer to go off on my own and do a project, but I lead a team and work in a strong team environment. I'm almost always pleasantly surprised at the synergy we get from different perspectives, even while simultaneously being frustrated by the painful process of bringing a group to consensus.
Sure, few important things get accomplished that are not the work of multiple hands.


I think it must be especially hellish though to make creative products with a team. On Project Runway, when the challenge fall short of judges expectations the team usually throws team leader under the bus to be eliminated.