It's not both. Either the taxi driver went through the process of being hired as HR personnel for the corporation, or else they didn't.

> what do you mean when you say "Maybe the powerless person is a homophobe" ?

The taxi driver may cause conflict with gay passengers. Or female passengers, or whatever else. Then they would blame their own victim for their reaction. The taxi driver's personal biases and animosities would become a vector for corporate discrimination.

There is a reason that corporate bureaucracies take such care to look out for this kind of thing. If you let ordinary people just go with their gut on things, you end up excluding a lot of people based on stereotypes and bias. It's not some theoretical possibility, but empirical fact.

The candidate would assume the taxi driver was powerless. I really think you’re reading too much into this. Op didn’t say they gave him veto power over their hiring process. It’s a good asshole test. Imagine some asshole was feeling important and powerful after getting flown out for an interview, and then cursed out a taxi driver because he wasn’t careful enough loading the luggage, or because he wasn’t driving aggressively enough. That’s exactly the kind of person I’d want filtered out.

> cursed out a taxi driver because he wasn’t careful enough loading the luggage

But what if this taxi driver really did toss around the interviewee's expensive luggage, with his best interview clothes and perhaps some materials or documents for an important interview the next day? Does the taxi driver report back, yea he got upset, but it was my fault? What if the interviewee just got off a long flight, wants to rest up for the interview, and isn't really up for chatting with a taxi driver? Does the taxi driver report back that he was rude, wouldn't talk?

I will agree that if the person is a total rageaholic nutcase, passing that info along to the company is valuable information. But reporting on anything else -- asking the driver to keep quiet, requesting he take better care of luggage, asking for a specific route, turning down the radio, whatever -- I'd be more suspicious that the driver is a nuisance than the interviewee has character flaws.

What if the driver actually became a taxi driver so that he could embed himself into the company's hiring process, gave dozens of fair, yet informal candidate reviews, spent years gaining everyone's confidence, all specifically so that one day he could sabotage his arch nemesis' interview by lying and denying him a job!

This subthread is really getting absurd. It's a perfectly good test to hear whether a candidate mistreated someone who they might perceive to be beneath them, and only severely asocial nerds would interpret Op's anecdote as if they put this taxi driver into the CI/CD pipeline to pass/fail candidates.

What's the point of having dedicated personnel, a human resources management division if you will, if an unaccountable outsider has the power to veto the entire hiring process? If you take it a few steps further, why not outsource the entire interview process?

> This subthread is really getting absurd.

It's an urban legend, a tired old trope of "gotcha!" style human observation that today is commonly used on the bottom-of-the-barrel TV talk shows like Maury Povich. The "absurd" part is that despite the tons of comments here, you haven't realized that yet. Lol.

I think you've just failed the test.

I really think this whole thread is full of people who would fail the “how did they treat the taxi cab driver / waitress” test and are incensed by the idea that they might be judged by that behaviour.

> I'd actually bet that homophobia is more common among immigrant taxi drivers

i wonder which of your demographics predisposes you to judge such people in this way?

Violence against homosexuals is pretty common in South and Central America - which is where most of recent American immigrants are from. Here's an example from CNN[1]

"Latin America offers a contradictory narrative: The region has the highest rates of violence against the LGBT community, according to research done by Transgender Europe, a non-governmental organization, but it also has some of the most progressive laws for LGBT equality and protection."

It seems like a pretty intuitive step to me to go from "Highest rate of hate crimes" to "more likely to be homophobic".

1 - https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/26/americas/lgbt-rights-in-the-a...

Perhaps, but it also seems intuitive to me that people who choose to (/ have the opportunity to) leave a country (i.e. immigrants) may not be representative of that country as a whole.