[droithomme]

Yeah, that's the part that gave the game away when the recruiter did the whack-a-mole move. The recruiter did in fact know exactly what the difference was and he was obstructing the candidate. Who knows why, maybe he feels there are too many asians working at Facebook so he takes it upon himself to play games with applicants who have asian names so they are more likely to give up, but he can still have plausible deniability in showing that he reached out to all ethnic groups if he's ever audited. This sort of stuff happens all the time in industry. If they are interested, management there can audit recruiter exchanges to identify different approaches a particular recruiter takes with different classes of applicants to find out exactly what classes or categories of persons they are obstructing.

[jsjohnst]

> Who knows why, maybe he feels there are too many asians working at Facebook so he takes it upon himself to play games with applicants who have asian names

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence/stupidity"

Hanlon's Razor definitely applies to your theory!

[mister_handy]

"A sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

[dzamo_norton]

> The recruiter did in fact know exactly what the difference was and he was obstructing the candidate.

For a little while I was basically convinced of deliberate obstruction - no sane person would use the arguments employed by the recruiter. But, on reading through from the top once more, the recruiter was actually initially helpful and I have settled on "incompetence, not malice". Almost settled, at least.