> She had already not gotten the job.

That's part of the point. If it were okay to ask a job candidate out after an interview, the incentive for an unscrupulous interviewer who encounters an attractive candidate is to scuttle the interview so he can ask the candidate out later on.

That's just part of why this behavior is so highly objectionable.

So, hypothetically, if we were to believe in fate and love at first sight (humor me here), your suggestion is that an interviewer that has passed on a candidate through a rigorous interview process with multiple interviewers where everyone said no for the same (or different) valid reasons... Simply accept the fact that he will never be able to date his "one and only?" That he won't ever even be able to see "what could have been?" That seems awfully unhuman; to deny yourself and another human the possibility of a potentially blissful relationship, solely because "we once met in a professional setting" seems, frankly, dumb.

Now, if he were the sole interviewer, or if he cut the interview short, or if he asked her DURING the interview, this would be a different conversation. But we don't know that.

Not every situation is the same, and it should not /always/ be "totally unacceptable" to ask someone out on a date. If they say no, and you pressure them, that's a different story.

Sometime you have to apply reason to a situation and understand the facts before casting judgment and making blanket statements. I have no reason to say that what this person did is acceptable; for all I know he WAS the only interviewer, and he did pressure her. But that's just it - we /don't/ know, and you cannot cast judgment to say that this is unacceptable as a result, without knowing more about the intricacies of the situation.

Generalizations like this are how we get into trouble in the first place.

Hypothetically, if we were to believe in fate and love at first sight, the odds of any given person encountering his soulmate in a world of 7+ billion people are so minuscule as to be ignorable.

More than the power dynamic, I think the stronger argument here is privacy. If you submit your information to a company to apply for a job, it's with the assumption that this information will only be used to evaluate and possibly hire you. Imagine if you submitted your resume somewhere, and they started sending you advertisements in the mail. You'd be outraged! Well, this is the same sort of thing. She gave this company her contact info so they could evaluate and possibly hire her, and here's a company insider using that information to contact her for a completely unrelated purpose. Spam, with unpleasant overtones of power.

I'll repeat:

If it were okay to ask a job candidate out after an interview, the incentive for an unscrupulous interviewer who encounters an attractive candidate is to scuttle the interview so he can ask the candidate out later on.

You haven't engaged that statement at all so I wonder why you responded to me.

My point was that if everyone else is positive on the interviewee, it should be very hard for the single interviewer to 'scuttle' the interview. And if everyone else is negative on the candidate, this is irrelevant.

Yes. I too feel the same.

It's implicit in the very fact of asking in that situation. Your response, and the neighboring one from ddoolin, is the equivalent of "I wasn't threatening her, I just always hold a knife in my hand like that."

The proper thing to do here if you really wanted to ask her out on a date is not to do it. There's plenty of other women out there you can meet in a more appropriate setting. There is no acceptable reason to turn a job interview into a date request.

>I wasn't threatening her, I just always hold a knife in my hand like that

He threw away the knife when he told her the was looking for someone with more experience.

That presumes that the outcome of an interview is set in stone the moment it's decided. That is not how things actually work.