Tuesday 11 March 2014

Make Sure You Do Not Ask Inappropriate Interview Questions at Interview



Although an Employers’ aim is to gain important information during an interview, some questions can be inappropriate and even illegal. 

Although in our experience most illegal questions are asked through ignorance they can still cause embarrassment or have significant legal implications. 

There are four kinds of unlawful discrimination – direct, indirect, victimisation and harassment – and, in this article I want to focus on the first two of these - direct discrimination and indirect discrimination.

Direct discrimination is a lot more obvious and is always illegal. 

However, indirect discrimination can be a lot more subtle and illegal interview questions with underlying discriminatory suggestions can often be asked quite innocently.  Some examples of this could be things like “What did your parents do for a living?”, “How many sick days did you take last year?” or "How far is your commute?"

Whilst not an exhaustive list of every illegal interview question you may find it useful to follow this link for some further examples of questions that Employers are not allowed to ask - http://www.aaronwallis.co.uk/questions-employers-are-not-allowed-to-ask.aspx
 
To conclude and to lessen the risk of asking inappropriate or illegal questions, we recommend that companies adopt a formal interview form that has been checked by a HR expert and to use this as the outline for interviewing across all levels.  


Written by Liam Oakes
Liam is the Office Manager at Aaron Wallis and has been with the company for 3 years after having a career with the RAF; Liam has helped hundreds of Sales Professionals secure a new Sales role and ensures that Aaron Wallis runs smoothly.

 

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