Just tell me I didn’t want their stupid job anyway.

[Lordfrontpaw]

So I applied for a job. All going well with the forms until I got to the ‘about you’ section

I was asked my sex and it was explained that HMRC only GIVES 2 OPTIONS

Then came - in roughly this order - am I trans? What is my gender, did I have school lunches (that would be back in the 70/80s), what did my dad do (Christ sake he died almost 20 years ago), what’s my religion, and a million other things (the very last one being did I consider myself disabled).

I answered ‘prefer not to say’ to all except the gender one where they thoughtfully had an option of a free text box.

I blew it didn’t I?

Isn't part of the point of the "triggering" concept that you won't necessarily know what's triggering for other people? So it's a bit silly to be all "well those questions were obviously triggering but you're being petty to have been bothered by this one".

No, they're just to monitor diversity etc... they'll still hire you if you're the best candidate.

Ridiculous thread

@LeftHandDown

"I ticked prefer not to say and unsurprisingly I didn't hear anything back."

Why unsurprisingly? It's rare for these forms to go to the person interviewing you, they're just (clumsily) doing data collection to see if they are appealing to the candidates they're trying to recruit.

It's so much more likely that you didn't get the job simply because you weren't the best candidate.

OP if you came across in interview like you have on here then I'd suspect that has more to do with it than the form.

Out of interest though, what HMRC job were you applying for that isn't civil service?

Wasn’t HMRC! I said before - it asked for sex but only gave 2 options, which it said was because HMRC only offered 2 options. It was a management consultant.

And I generally come across well in interviews thank you very much. Pondering the questions asked - and the order in which they were asked - on a monitoring form on an anonymous online forum isn’t quite the same is it?

I recently filled out a job application that asked for my gender and did I identify with the gender I was assigned at birth, it was for a women county council. I ticked prefer not to say, got an interview though.

Woke not women

It’s odd. If quotas are being measured why is sex in there almost apologetically (HMRC only give is 2 options) but the gender one had about 6 options. Why is that important above options that could actually have lifelong consequences (poverty, disability, etc)

In this one they didn’t ask sexual orientation which you used to see sometimes.

@crustycrab. I hadn't been asked to an interviews, just sent the equality form after applying for a job. Seems an awful lot of bother and a waste of time for everybody if every applicant is sent equality forms if they're not going to bother interviewing.

In small companies, that don't have separate HR depts, is not unimaginable that the person interviewing also has access to any equality forms.

BBC?

Management Consultants (the very last word in PC)

The parents job question is about social mobility.

I was reading about a speaker at an event this week. She went to uni, has a thriving business - so on paper, her children would be the same as, say Richard Branson's kids?

Her biog reads - 'The youngest of 11 children, her parents didn’t have enough funds for her to even start secondary school, so she, along with her mother, went to the public dump in Trinidad to ‘hustle’ through large mounds of waste and rubbish, looking for empty bottles to sell...'

So it's not all black and white really.

The fact is that the questions are all about box ticking and quotas.

If they didn't worry about box ticking and quotas, women would still be being excluded from many workplaces (more so than now).

Not if they only ask one sex-based question and more on gender. Then it means nothing really if 'female' can mean either sex.

Are any small to medium-sized private companies ever asked to produce stats anyway?