Okay. What do you do if you are interviewing somebody you genuinely dislike? That can be a natural thing. I’ve interviewed rapists, people who have said mean and nasty things about me or even to me. Those people are not the kind of people I tend to like, but at the end of the day, one of my most significant obligations is to check my bias at the door. Because whether or not somebody did something in the workplace is unrelated to my feelings about that person. Now it can be evidence if someone is being accused of gender bias, and then that person makes a gender-biased comment about me in the interview. You know, that’s great evidence. But the actual feelings of my reactions to that need to be entirely professional and outside the realm of my conclusions as an interviewer. And that is much easier said than done, but it helps to talk about it and to say things before you go into the interview, say things like I am very concerned about my bias in this interview, help me check myself. And even by just saying it out loud, you will do a lot better job of internally checking yourself and your own bias.
So I guess that’s the answer when you genuinely don’t like somebody you’re interviewing, check your bias at the door, and do your job.
