When interviewing with the person who will be your immediate supervisor, don’t call her “dear.” No matter how much older than her you are.
:rolleyes:
I think the appropriate response to that is to refer to her as ‘fluffy-wuffy snoochikins’.
If she get affronted, you can say ‘Well, after you called me ‘dear’, I thought we were just *that *close, y’know.’
Agreed. The best form of address for a man to woman interview is “Hun” and for a woman to woman interview is “Sister”. Both convey the appropriate levels of respect yet intimacy that the job will eventually require.
I still gotta go with “sugartits.”
I once had an interview for a job in my hometown’s water-purification plant. When the interviewer asked me to describe my research, I asked her how much chemistry did she know, to adjust the explanation. She laughed and told me she was the person I’d be replacing as plant manager; she’d just been promoted so she would be my boss, if I got the job.
I ran into her a few days later. She was very upset. She’d proposed three candidates: myself and two other women. Her boss had interviewed only the single male candidate. She hadn’t proposed us out of feminism; she’d proposed us because she’d thought we’d be best at the job. And he was the one candidate she absolutely didn’t want to work with. He’d called her “honey”, “love” and “dear” at different points through the interview, as well as refusing to explain details of his previous employment on grounds of “well, sweetie, you wouldn’t understand the chemistry involved”.
Gee, I’m sure that telling your interviewer what they don’t know about the field where they got their degree is very wise.
I have found that turning the interview back on to the interviewer helps.
I was the interviewer. 
Sorry. I read the OP the other way
This is what really bugs me, leaving out the flagrantly icky part: she is supposed to be trusted to pre-screen the candidates and make a recommendation. Why would he second-guess her and even see the guy at all? That must make her feel great :rolleyes: especially when the person will be her direct report, not his.
Apparently the extent of her pre-screening was supposed to end once she had identified the gender of the applicants.
At a job interview some years ago and after having programmed a CNC milling machine the interviewer said to me “You’re just the person we’ve been looking for”
He followed this up with “We’ll let you know”
I asked him if he’d any idea how stupid his last two statements were.
I didn’t get the job and about 4 weeks later the company went tits up…oh great joy!
Maybe he had some hoops to jump through and couldn’t hire on the spot? We certainly can’t here. And probably he was pissed that you just stood around while he programmed the machine.
At the risk of being whooshed I think that chowder meant that he had been programming the machine.
On a related note to all of those interviewers out there. Please, please do not promise, or imply a promise, to hire an interviewee if there is no official decision made. I cannot express how frustrating it was when I was searching for an internship to here interviewers essentially (and sometimes literally) tell me that I was going to get the job only to here back later that week that someone else had been hired.
Now, now, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. Just run along.
[pats Misnomer on the ass]
D&R
Misnomer, does this mean you’ll be hiring the less-qualified applicant who remembered to call you “ma’am?” If so, you’re sacrificing your organization’s best interests to your personal sensibility. All the more needlessly, since it was a faux pas that could have been so easily fixed.
Your applicant misspoke, certainly, but not in a rude, bigoted, misogynistic or even frankly condescending way. He called you “dear,” which is overly familiar, but if he is enough your senior for that to be the explanation, well, then that’s probably the explanation. If you’re less than confident of your ability to establish forms of address with your staff, which I hope is one of the least important protocols for which you’re responsible, even in a situation such as a job interview where you hold all the power, how on Earth do you manage your department? By hiring only perfect people who never need correction?
You’re absolutely right, in that the incident deserves to be included in the next edition of 1,001 interview mistakes, but if you excluded the best applicant for this alone, that’s a management mistake as well. I like you and I’m all for you, Misnomer, but are you sure you weren’t merely seizing an excuse to blackball the old guy?
chowder, I once spent an entire day interviewing, taking tests, etc., at a certain company, and was told at the end of the day that I was a top candidate but that they were concerned that I scored a couple percent lower than optimum on the “impulsiveness” section of one of the personality tests, and so they’d need a week or so to make their final decision. I excluded myself from further consideration by asking, “So you’re telling me that you need a week to decide whether I can make decisions fast enough?”
I got a great job shortly after I decided that the interview process was all about how quickly I could establish a pleasantly subordinate relationship to the interviewer.
I’ve heard that jumping to conclusions is especially dangerous from up on a soapbox. :rolleyes:
[ul][li]Nowhere did I mention the sex of the applicant. It happened to be a woman.[/li][li]Nowhere did I say that I expect to be called “ma’am.” I don’t expect to be called anything. What I expect is to be treated professionally.[/li][li]Nowhere did I say whether the applicant would be getting an offer. That hasn’t been decided yet, but your overreactions can take a break: if we don’t hire her, it will be because of her iffy technical skills, not because of one condescending slip of the tongue.[/li][li]Nowhere did I make any comment about my ability to handle condescension in the workplace. As a woman who is young and looks as much as 10 years younger, it’s something I’ve certainly gotten used to. It didn’t endear me to the applicant, and if she’s not able to treat her potential supervisor professionally during an interview I wonder if she’ll be able to control herself when working full-time at the customer site, but it would never be the sole reason I didn’t hire someone.[/ul][/li]The only part of your little diatribe that is accurate is the part that says “your applicant misspoke.”
Gee, and here I was trying to prevent you from over-reacting to someone calling you “dear.” If I’m on a soapbox, lambikins, you’re on stilts. Sweetie.
So there was even less reason to take offense than I assumed for you. An older woman calling a young woman “dear” is as an expected a constuction as anyone other than someone looking for offense could expect.
I bet you’d be pretty freaked out if you “weren’t called anything.” Treating someone professionally would include a frank admission of why being called “dear” wasn’t acceptable to you. But that apparently didn’t happen.
So the OP is meaningless? The slip of the tongue wouldn’t lose her the job? Calling you “dear” doesn’t override qualifications and experience? Well, good, then. The slip of the tongue still wasn’t “condescending,” though, which raises the question, why is this an issue for you?
Your OP provides more than enough evidence on that score.
I believe the first part and will take on faith the second. Doesn’t excuse you from doing your job, though. Hire the people who can do the job, not the ones who suck up to you hard enough.
And that is entirely outside your control, as both an interviewer and a supervisor? I begin to understand why you might prefer young untrained kids, however much damage it might do to your company, but it doesn’t exactly speak to your value as a hiring manager.
And that’s a pointer as to why your boss made a big mistake in promoting you. You see only others’ errors, never your own.
Gigi As Alistair Mc says I was the one who programmed the machine, the interviewer just stood and gawped and obviously hadn’t the faintest idea what I was doing.
Also as Alistair says, Don’t hold out false hopes. There is nothing more annoying than being told that you’re the one they want and then being told that they’ll let you know…dummies!
Simmer down dear. 
King of Soup, I’m really not sure where all of your attitude is coming from. You professed to “like me” and “be on my side,” yet you make all kinds of negative assumptions about the OP and then get nasty (and personal, btw, which I don’t believe is allowed in this forum) when I dare to correct you?
The problem is your assumption that I would overreact, and that I needed some kind of intervention.
I’m not sure why you hold to this belief that it’s ok for older people to be condescending and inappropriate just because they’re older. You seem to expect it of them. Besides, this woman was maybe 20 years older than me, we’re not talking about a senior citizen or something.
First, you have no idea what did or didn’t happen. Second, you’re wrong: treating someone professionally would include an understanding that the “dear” was just a slip of the tongue, a recognition of the fact that the woman seemed to know that what she’d said was inappropriate, and the grace to let it slip. If we decide to hire her – and if it happens again – that’s when a discussion about such things would take place.
I have no idea what made you draw those conclusions, but of course the OP is meaningless! This is MPSIMS! What forum did you think we were in?
I will never understand why people on this board feel the need to defend their opinions as though they were fact. IT IS MY OPINION that the way this woman used “dear” was, in fact, condescending. You weren’t there, you have no information other than what I have provided, therefore it’s a little rude – and condescending – of you to be telling me that I’m wrong.
React to what the OP says, not to what you read into it.
Yawn.
Right, one brief, misunderstood OP in MPSIMS and of course you now know everything about my management style and whether I should have been promoted. Uh huh.