That's the whole range eh?
Sure. Everyone should be sad about that. There are plenty of people out there who don't have any willingness to treat people in service jobs like driving a taxi with any sort of humanity. Too many people will just ignore the fact that these people are living, breathing human beings with feelings of their own, and treat them as if either they don't exist, or that they exist to serve them. It's quite appalling.
Treating someone like a human being means having kindness, respect, and empathy for them. It means not expecting them to demean themselves just because you're paying them to do something. It's treating them well even without knowing them.
It's quite a high bar apparently, and a lot of people out there don't manage it.
It's not a high bar. There's just a surprising number of people that are really good at playing limbo.
Missed this first half of the sentence.
- They were OK
- They treated me like a human being
- They were rude
There's no room for "We had an interesting conversation" or "They gave me some good advice" or "I think I made a new friend"? Not even "They seemed like a good person"?
The maximum is "They treated me like a human being" which is somehow above "They were OK"?
My original point, however, was to highlight the fact that "They treated me like a human being" was given as the example of a positive interaction.
Which is absolutely absurd. And I don't think I'm taking that too literally.
I get the impression everything was relatively informal in the process they described. In forums like these, it's about looking at the spirit of what they were trying to say and get across.
2. Have you interacted with many human beings?
We'd all love it if being treated as a human being were the bare minimum, but quite a few people didn't get the memo and fall quite a bit below it. You really do want to filter out those folks in your hiring process. Unfortunately, here on HN, some commenters view any sort of hiring filter, much less one like "don't be an asshole", as a personal attack.
2. Yeah... You're not wrong.
In this case just knowing the driver well enough to ask them "Was that person nice to you?" when they drop a candidate off gets you another very useful signal when the response isn't neutral. A lot of the time it'll be "they were OK", but occasionally you'll get a positive "they treated me like a human being" or a negative "no, they were rude".
If you just get an "OK" then you're back to hiring as normal, without the extra data. If you get a positive or negative signal that can amplify what you see in the rest of the hiring process. For me, a tick in the "nice to people you don't have to be nice to" box is a good thing. I like to work with people who have that trait. If I can find a signal that indicates a person has it then I'm going to use it when I'm hiring.