3 Interview Questions That Always Cause Trouble

When you’re an interviewing a prospective employee, there are simply some things you can’t ask. There are the obvious questions that can lead immediately to an accusation of discrimination (such as asking about religion or sexual orientation), but there are also plenty of more subtle questions that can land you in hot water. Even if your business isn’t large enough to have a big human resources department and a lawyer to offer advice on the hiring process, you have to avoid problem questions.

Don’t Ask About Family

The moment you start asking a job applicant about his or her family, you’re opening up a can of worms. You’re asking questions that can touch on all sorts of situations that can create an opportunity to accuse you of discrimination. Questions about family can lead to answers that involve sexual orientation, whether a woman or a man can do a job better and even religion, depending on how your applicant answers. They’re all dangerous territory.

It’s tempting to try to get a feel for whether an employee will be in a position to put in long hours — but you can only ask that specifically, not whether an applicant has kids at home that he’ll need to get back to.

Don’t Ask About Citizenship

With crackdowns on employers hiring illegal immigrants, it seems like you should be allowed to ask if a job applicant is a U.S. citizen — but it’s actually against the law. That’s because there have been cases of discrimination against people who can legally work in the U.S. but don’t actually have citizenship yet.

The closest you can come to asking about citizenship is asking whether someone is authorized to work in the country. Luckily, that serves the same purpose most of the time, because illegal immigrants simply don’t have authorization to work in the country.

Don’t Ask If They Need Certain Holidays Off

Scheduling is a big issue for many companies. There are many constraints on what you can ask a prospective employee about her schedule, though, down to whether she wants a particular holiday off. Asking if an employee will want Yom Kippur off from work is, in the eyes of the law, the same as asking her if she’s Jewish.

You can ask about scheduling — such as whether or not an employee can work with your required schedule — but that’s about it.

You Don’t Want Too Much Information

There are job applicants that will volunteer all sorts of information about themselves during an interview, but you really want to keep your information to a minimum. You only want to know if a given applicant can fulfill a job’s requirements to your expectations. You don’t want any information that can lead to an accusation of discrimination down the line. That means carefully choosing your questions and even cutting off an interviewee if they offer up more information than you actually want.

Image by Flickr user Pulpolux (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 13th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Workforce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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