Lessons in Boundaries and Diversity From an Elevator Encounter

The rules of elevator riding: Get in, face forward, don’t speak except to ask someone to push a button, and please control all bodily noises and smells.

The no-speaking rule changes if you are talking with someone who you already know or with whom you were speaking before you got in the elevator. Yes, the famed elevator pitch breaks the rules unless you were introduced before.

An adult male recruiter got in an elevator with a teenage boy (estimated age 14-15) and asked him to push the button for his floor, which the boy did. (The recruiter posted on LinkedIn but took it down after it became controversial, so I agreed not to name him.)

According to my self-proclaimed rules, that is where the conversation should have ended. But it didn’t. The recruiter asked him how his morning was going, to which the boy, head down, muttered, “good.”

This should have been a clear signal to the adult that this person did not wish to engage with him and should have been the end. Instead, the recruiter tried once more (“Have a nice day,” to which the boy replied with a quiet “thanks.”) and then came to the wrong conclusion.

To keep reading, click here: Lessons in Boundaries and Diversity From an Elevator Encounter

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2 thoughts on “Lessons in Boundaries and Diversity From an Elevator Encounter

  1. I swear, 90+ percent of the HR and recruiting-related advice on the internet is people just pulling things out of their ears for the sole purpose of just pumping out content. Person acted like a person in an elevator? Life advice! Ordering soup for lunch in a restaurant? A test of someone’s thought processes (and let’s make up a link to some dead white dude while we’re at it)!

    I will be you my morning coffee that had that imaginary kid been the one to try to strike up a conversation, he’d have coughed up an article about the importance of observing cultural norms….

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