Recently I applied for a city government position in a small town. As I understand there was an Employment Screening completed by an outside party and my application was the only one that was considered qualified. The hiring official then decided to extend the job interviews to the unqualified applicants also.

The interview panel was made up of the hiring official and some City Council People. The questions asked during the interview were purposely designed to give the part time employee holding the vacant position an upper edge. The questions were based on real life scenario’s that occurred to the part time employee during her time there. She is also interviewing for the position. These questions were asked in a role playing atmosphere. When these real life scenarios played out the part time employee was clueless on how to handle them and seeked help from other city officials on how to handle the issues. I consider this to be an unfair advantage to the rest of the people who interviewed for this position because this part time employee knows the answers since it actually happened to her. I have a witness who can attest to this because he was the one who told her how to solve the issues in real life.

Also I was given a practical exercise that involved speed typing and something called mail merge. The person giving me the test apologized for the small laptop keyboard I was to take the test on because apparently they lost the LAN cord for the desktop computer. I also asked what operating system it was and was told it was Windows 7 which I never used and later found that this city did not start using it yet, but they were going to. During the mail merge exercise I had trouble merging it. I learned that the part time employee was shown how to do it by fulltime employees before the interview, I have a witness for this also.

This interview apparently was set up to give this part time employee a definite advantage. If she is hired for this position, is there anything I can do?

Unless you can show you were discriminated against as part of a protected class, I am not sure how. Have you browsed through the information in LawInfo's Free Legal Resource Center to learn more about your issue yet? See: http://www.lawinfo.com/consumer.html. You can certainly try to speak to a lawyer to determine what legal options may be available. In the meantime, you may be able to learn more on your own. Search the "Free Legal Resources" tab, or browse the Consumer Resources. Good luck.