I see. (I had guessed you were talking of people who have to directly¹ interact with perspective customers, so you have to know what they look and sound like in order to know what first impression perspective customers might get.)
Of course what “directly” means depends on where you are; I hear there’s a country where people will boycott a Web browser solely because of the political stance of the CEO of the company making it on a topic with hardly anything to do with software. ;-)
Yes, that would be another example. But, I think, a different sort of example. Let’s suppose that candidate A comes across better than candidate B in interview simply because of widely-shared prejudices affecting the interviewers. For the kind of job you describe, that (rather horribly) means that candidate A probably is better able to do the job than candidate B.
(It might well be that the best thing overall is to try to stop people in that situation favouring A over B on account of prejudice anyway, in the hope that over time this reduces the overall level of prejudice and everyone is better off.)
I see. (I had guessed you were talking of people who have to directly¹ interact with perspective customers, so you have to know what they look and sound like in order to know what first impression perspective customers might get.)
Of course what “directly” means depends on where you are; I hear there’s a country where people will boycott a Web browser solely because of the political stance of the CEO of the company making it on a topic with hardly anything to do with software. ;-)
Yes, that would be another example. But, I think, a different sort of example. Let’s suppose that candidate A comes across better than candidate B in interview simply because of widely-shared prejudices affecting the interviewers. For the kind of job you describe, that (rather horribly) means that candidate A probably is better able to do the job than candidate B.
(It might well be that the best thing overall is to try to stop people in that situation favouring A over B on account of prejudice anyway, in the hope that over time this reduces the overall level of prejudice and everyone is better off.)