I once interviewed at a medium sized, name brand Silicon Valley darling everyone on HN has heard of, where an interviewer outright asked me if I was married and if I had kids! Like, holy shit, just read your interview training manual! The very first sentence is probably "Do not ask any questions where the answer would even imply information about things that would get us in trouble discrimination-wise." Yet this person overtly asked! Here I was in the stairwell walking down to the second floor and she hits me up with one of the few totally forbidden questions! I thought about saying "What would HR think of that question?" but the asker was the HR manager! Totally bonkers.
An interesting strategy?
This case is strictly worse because the questions are explicitly being asked to evaluate eligibility for hiring.
Are you a virgin?
I could definitely see arguments for asking these sorts of questions in how they could be job related but not worth the legal risk
I haven't had (nor ever likely will) have the luxury of working somewhere where potential/smarts is too relevant past a relatively low threshold
Are you suggesting that this is bad? What do you hope to gain by seeking out obnoxious people with traumatic backstories and broken families with yuck problems? Misery loves company?
Obviously performance is also a critical factor but your comment gave me the impression that you don't see any value (or even harm) in targeting charming people without yucky problems. They do indeed sound like "perfect" colleagues to me!
Screening for people with life stories that you/anyone deems acceptable is extremely problematic, because realistically you will never have access to deeply personal information about 90% of your coworkers. As in, you should not be forcing Janet from accounting to disclose to you that she was abused by her stepfather, because if she is a well-adjusted adult it would have absolutely no bearing on your interactions with her at a workplace
All else being equal, a person who enjoyed an idyllic childhood is typically going to be a more well-adjusted adult than someone who experienced the most depraved, violent, extreme child abuse imaginable.
I don't even have any interest in discussing the finer points with someone who completely denies the long-term effects of adverse childhood experiences.
We are talking about specifically work-related scenarios, that usually have pretty straightforward boundaries and surface-level interactions. "All else being equal, a person who enjoyed an idyllic childhood is typically going to be a more well-adjusted adult" - not necessarily in this specific context, people that didn't experience trauma are not immune to being awkward, immature, neurotic, anxious and various other things that makes working with them difficult.
That is not to say that people who have experienced childhood abuse can't have issues with basic human functioning. The point is, neither are necessarily are better or worse to work with just based on their trauma or lack of thereof.
It is irrelevant that people with normal childhoods are statistically more likely to be well-adjusted in most aspects of their lives, because we are only considering workplace interactions.