The candidate was up for a top job, and I, as a sort of poor man’s Alan Sugar, was the interviewer. Unlike Sir Alan, with his forthright questions and even more forthright firing style, I was operating under severe inhibitions. I was not allowed to ask about the applicant’s age, married status or domestic circumstances. Indeed, until he/she walked through the door I could only guess at his/her sex, since the name on the CV in front of me was concealed by an initial – I think it was J.

The rules under which I was operating were laid down by equal opportunities legislation, which forbids any line of questioning that might be seen as discriminating against one sex or the other. This turned out to be geographically, as well as domestically, challenging. The candidate in question (J was in fact a woman) gave an address that lay some 400 miles due south of where the job was going to be. I was not, however, entitled to inquire whether there might be any difficulty in “relocating” – that is, finding new schools for children, or bringing a husband/partner along with her. When I strayed off-limits in an unguarded moment by wondering whether she had any family connections with the area, I was given such a sharp kick under the table that I nurse the bruise to this day.

This, of course, was a public sector job – the organisation involved was the Scottish Arts Council – so the laws governing sex discrimination were applied with bureaucratic rigour. But those same laws apply evenly across the employment field, and most companies these days observe them to the letter. When I complained that it was only fair to ask basic questions about family, schools and moving house, I was told this was unacceptable. Any female candidate who was turned down could sue for discrimination on the ground that I had not asked similar questions of the men, and I would thus have been guilty of gender bias.

So, when Sir Alan challenged Katie Hopkins, his would-be apprentice, on television last week, on whether her priorities lay with her home and children rather than the job for which she was applying, he was promptly accused of overstepping the mark. Although in the end it was she who pulled out, rather than he who turned her down, his suggestion that her commitment was in doubt because she was more concerned about her children than the job was seen to be driving a coach and horses through current employment law. “If you ask a female candidate and not the male [about such things as child care] it’s not just unfair, it’s illegal,” Katherine Rake, of the Fawcett Society, which monitors equal opportunities, told the BBC. A listener to Woman’s Hour called to say that Sir Alan’s line of questioning had been “horrific”.

The Apprentice: bad for business?

In The Apprentice is Sir Alan Sugar’s confrontational style is out of step with modern business methods?

• The hired and the fired: where are they now?

• Sir Alan Sugar – you’re fired!

• Sugar faces sexism row as ex-Apprentice sells story

BACKGROUND

• Women won’ t like this, but Sugar was right and fair

• Apprentice Katie fired from real job

• Superbitches are sad

• Sugar faces sexism row after story sold

Related Links

• The hired and the fired: where are they now?

• Sir Alan Sugar – you’re fired!

• Apprentice Katie fired from real job

Actually, I think he was being fair, not just to his company but to Hopkins as well. Far better, surely, to have these matters out in the open than to base a decision on post-interview whispers, ill-informed speculation and the subsequent breakdown of a working relationship. The employer who is investing not just a substantial salary (in the case of The Apprentice £100,000) but the health of the company in the executive potential of the applicant he is interviewing needs to feel that he understands the person as well as the employee. Most bosses, when pressed, will say that identifying the well-balanced, well-rounded character who can work with a team, or lead it, is ultimately more important than finding the one who can read a balance sheet upside down. Questions about personal backgrounds, wives or husbands, children and schools are a far more natural way of getting to know someone than pressing them on cost-benefit analysis or quality assurance schemes.

There seems no reason why men should not be asked about the same things, but in the nature of things it is inevitable that women, as home-runners, mothers and mothers-to-be, are more likely to find themselves being cross-examined. And here is the rub – does that mean they are automatically more vulnerable to discrimination? The law says yes, but that is surely only the case if the interview has been badly handled. Any woman applying for a senior position is likely to have thought far more about the necessary balance between job and home than the person she is being interviewed by – and to have reached a solution she is happy with. If she has not, then she is unlikely to be sitting on the other side of the desk applying for the job. Being able to discuss the solution she has reached openly and frankly is surely a better way – for both applicant and employer – of judging whether the balance has been well struck than one side trying to guess and the other side to conceal.

Thus, Hopkins came to the conclusion, under Sir Alan’s robust questioning, that her priorities lay back in Exeter where her home was, rather than in the job she was applying for. That, surely, was a better outcome than having to pretend that she had found a way of caring for her children, when, patently, she had not.

Such an approach would have to be applied evenly between the sexes – and this too would be no bad thing. I would have thought that the way a man responds to a similar range of questions would be an excellent test of his aptitude. If he simply answers: “Well, I leave that kind of thing to the wife,” he is probably going to miss the salient detail in the next big advertising campaign, or forget to ask the key question on which an entire deal might founder – so he probably didn’t deserve the job in the first place.

The good thing about Sir Alan is that he rarely bothers to sugar the pill. You may not like the taste of the medicine he hands out. But at least you know where you stand.

Times Recommends

• A dose of defeat is just the medicine
• Protecting ourselves from Eurocreep
• After the summer of LUV, it'll still hurt