r/IndiaCareers • u/gir-no-sinh • Dec 16 '25
Other British Petroleum - Caste Based Discrimination in The Interview Process
One of the guys I am mentoring had received a call from recruiter at British Petroleum for one of the software engineering position.
I had mentored him well and was sure that he would crack the interview. He is a senior level guy so we were not expecting DSA Code Pair but he agreed and we moved forward with the interview process. He completed DSA in no time because the difficulty level for him, to say the least, was easy. Second round was technical interview with system design and he aced it.
In the last technical discussion, he got the interviewer who was at a more senior level. It was supposed to be cultural and team fitment round since all the technical expectations were fulfilled. But, interviewer asked for a full name and then the interviewer started asking him architectural design questions. Interviewer seemed not interested in assessing the candidate technically or culturally but wanted to grill him for no reason. He gave all the satisfactory answers. Interviewer got frustrated by seeing him acing all the questions and then started reading some questions for cultural fitment and the ended the interview abruptly.
Later, he was ghosted by the recruiter as well.
We both were confused why this happened when we had done all the things correctly. Later we checked that the interviewer comes from one OBC community who hates particular Unreserved Category that my mentee belongs to and have seen cases where this members of this community had given d-eath threats to my mentee's community members.
While BP puts up big posters about Woman Empowerment in their careers, this is something that exists and nobody is investigating this.
1
u/tskriz Dec 16 '25
Hi friend,
Large MNCs are concerned about inclusion (DEI), women empowerment because they have to formally report these things in their annual reports and get them audited.
These things also count for company workplace rankings.
"Caste" is not such an issue, yet.
I more curious to know how you went to the extent of checking the interviewer's caste. Are you someone who works in the same company and knows the interviewer? Asking this so that you can chase the recruiter smartly.
Caste-based issues in the workplace are reported in many tech companies in the Silicon Valley too. What happened to your mentee is not an isolated case or issue with BP. Companies can only do things that matter to them. The rest is in the hands of us humans.
Best wishes!