Do certain human characteristics overwhelm whats important? Do we look at the wrong things in job interviews?
Blink tells a story about a trombonist who won an audition with the Munich Philharmonic, but when she came out from behind the screen, the conductor couldn’t get past the fact that she was a woman; she had to spend years in court to take the seat she had won. It’s a case in which they were looking at the wrong things. In job interviews, we need to be aware of precisely what we are interested in finding out about this person — and what is irrelevant. And we need to remove the source of the irrelevant information, because that’s only going to mess us up. Can interviewers learn to block out what’s not important? Maybe twenty years from now, our social stereotypes will have changed to the point where a conductor can look at a female trombonist and not have the same hangup. We’ve progressed to the stage where if the doctor who’s treating us is a woman, or an African-American, we’re not worried. We would have been worried fifty years ago; a lot of us have come a long way in dealing with tha
