Ideapad

Fun with focus groups, on the Ai blog.

I'm fascinated by this turn of events (read the post, then come back here). An interviewee took a gift card from our office manager and left without investigating why it was handed to her. A paid job interview! For her, the golden goose has surely arrived.

At the same time, this isn't an impossible scenario to understand, and our interviewee does get some benefit of the doubt. She was handed the card; she didn't swipe it on her way out or anything (unlike the mystery visitor who made off with our Wii controllers last fall). Poor Katie was obviously too busy to explain, so the interviewee took off. She may have figured it was a lovely parting gift, like Rice-a-Roni for a game-show contestant.

Still, who does that?

We spent this morning wondering what, if anything, to do. Do we contact the interviewee about the gift card? Let her keep it? Let her keep it but tell her, so she knows what happened (and present her with an ethical dilemma about returning it)? We don't want to rock the boat too much--we liked the candidate, and we'd be in a tough spot if we hired her and she wasn't in on the joke. Yet it also presents an ethical question: whether we should hire someone who takes a gift card without stopping to clarify why.

The Ai blog is a happy fun place, unlike my soul-searching moral compass of a journal, and we've had a lot of company goodness this week:
~ Ai at the circus—as advertised
~ The new guy—a great essay by our most recent hire