#63 “I set up a meeting with the candidate and invited a white male coworker along to shadow….”

“My manager asked me to speak to someone that was interested in transferring to our team from another team within Amazon. I set up a meeting with the candidate and invited a white male coworker along to shadow. Even though my manager instructed the candidate to meet with me, even though I set up the meeting, the candidate spent the whole first half of the meeting only addressing my coworker. If I asked him a question, he would turn and converse on the topic with my coworker. My coworker had to spend half of the meeting redirecting to me before the candidate finally began interacting with me directly.

After the meeting, when we gave this information to my manager, he put the burden on me to decide whether or not to hire the candidate. If we didn’t hire him, we would continue to be short staffed; if we did hire him, there were strong signs that he wouldn’t treat various members of the team with equal amounts of dignity and respect.”