[filoleg]

Anecdotal side-tangent: had a terrible second-hand experience with AWU.

I was an employee, and a friend of mine was interviewing at Google. After one of his interviews, he called me up and asked if I heard of AWU. I was not sure what prompted that, but I said I was roughly familiar with AWU, and then my friend elaborated on what went down.

Turns out, his interviewer spent half the interview just buzzing my friend’s ears off about AWU and trying to recruit him to join before my friend even got the offer.

And then my friend told me the exact details of what was said about AWU and what they do, and my ears just rolled up, because I realized that he was getting coaxed by an AWU member with a bunch exaggerations and half-truths. Mostly about the perceived self-importance of AWU, how much they actually accomplish, and what they actually do.

Left a sour taste in my mouth, because doing this as an interviewer is imo pretty unethical.

[true_religion]

Many unions have a goal that no one should be hired unless they are already a union member.

[filoleg]

If AWU’s goal is to waste valuable candidate time during the interview process on AWU propaganda (involving a bunch of misleading statements and half-lies about their group, on top of that), then perhaps my personal goal would be to report every single interviewer doing this (if I catch any during the feedback review sessions) and get them barred from interviewing candidates moving forward.

I don’t have anything against AWU specifically and am fully in favor of following this tactic for absolutely any group that tries to waste a candidate’s time in similar ways during an interview.

If the candidate asked for more info on this during the informal discussion during first/last 10 mins of the interview, that’s fine. It is also fine if the interviewer decided to disclose the info about their group briefly without being prompted (just like other interviewers might mention being involved in an ERG or some employee club or whatever). But it is imo not fine to shill it without being prompted for half the interview timeslot. Doubly so when you do it using a bunch of half-truths and almost outright lies.

P.S. That experience almost turned away my friend from wanting to work for Google, because he was afraid that this was the “typical Google experience.” I had to assure him that this was an outlier and not representative of how the rest of the people working here were like. Luckily, the rest of his interviewers were great, and he trusted me enough to believe me about this not being normal, so he took the offer once he got it.