I’m the manager of our restaurant, he’s the head chef and we work as a team but technically he is who I would report to. I do the hiring, but we were interviewing a girl who might cross train for back of house, so he wanted to do the interview with me. Which made sense, but the problem is the chef is incredibly chatty and I try to let people talk about themselves during the interview. So we sit down with the girl and he proceeds to drill her with questions, talks over her and me about himself, I ended up sitting there. Finally I’m able to get the girl a pen to fill out her application and asked if she’d want some coffee or water, I don’t like to watch someone fill out the application so I walked away to give her time. When I walked back out he was sitting there with her chatting away! He didn’t even call me back.
Then he comes back and says how nice she was, I was like I agree but from now on let’s do our interviews separately. He immediately gets defensive and wants to know what I mean. I said “We conduct interviews differently so let’s do them separately from now on.” He’s like “Well I oversee everything here so I should have a hand in everything, etc.” I’m like, “I hear you but I try to not talk over the interviewee.” He’s like “I wasn’t doing that, you need to speak up, etc.” I don’t want to compete with a guy who isn’t on the same page as me. I also don’t drill interviewees with questions about what they could bring to the table because I know most people just bullshit and I don’t get a feel for who they are. I try to tell them about the job and let the conversation flow. I feel like what I told him wasn’t unreasonable. I’m also ten years younger and this is my first year as a manager but I think I’m being rational.