This is a small part of why anti-discrimination laws are harmful. Companies can't be honest because they need to cover for potential discrimination lawsuits.

If you go a step further, a truly racist company is never going to hire someone of a race they look down on, but they can't put anything on a job description about it, so they just end up wasting a minority's time.

Being a non-native English speaker (edit: my native language is French) leaving in South-East Asian I can attest to two things:

- peoples accent improves in the first months of them practicing (with you).

- my understanding of non-native English speaker (Thai, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, etc) improved in weeks of exposure.

So I don't think anti-discrimination laws are harmful. The situation may not be as confortable for a few weeks but eventually it does not get on the way of productivity.

edit: added my native language, French

>they just end up wasting a minority's time.

They also waste their own time, so there's some good coming out of it.

But I wouldn't say unintelligible accent is racism. I've met some unintelligible people that were born and raised where I live.

An accent is also something you can change (even though it's hard). So it would be really valuable feedback to the person who's not getting it.

_You_ wouldn't say an unintelligible accent is racism, but a civil court might. It's valuable feedback for the candidate, but it's high risk (high magnitude, even if chance of happening is low) and near-zero reward for the company.

Yes, I completely agree with that. In the end as an interviewee you have to learn to read body language and subtext and see where (and if) it goes south in your interviews.

I can usually predict quite well who will hire me based on my interview experience, but I've been surprised some times where I got hired after I thought I failed completely at the interview. This may sound weird, but in that case I usually assume the company couldn't find anybody else, which is also a red flag for me.

I partly agree and yet... surely the candidate noticed that communicating was difficult?

If they're never getting the feedback that they're hard to follow, maybe they don't?

There is a point where you realise you don't understand, and are too embarrassed to ask someone to repeat for the fourth time. So you kinda take a guess and move on to something else.

It may not be obvious to the other party that you didn't understand depending how well you covered.