Job Recruiter’s Probing Irks Stanford Students

A New York investment banking firm will send an emissary to Stanford University this week to make amends to Stanford students upset by a job interviewer who allegedly asked them about such topics as religion, sexual preference, drugs and abortion.

A spokesman for Goldman, Sachs & Co. said the company will send another interviewer Wednesday for students who talked with Goldman Sachs employee Michael Werner last month.

The campus newspaper, the Stanford Daily, quoted an unidentified senior woman as saying that Werner “asked me if I would have an abortion to save my job. When I walked out of the interview, I was terribly angry.”

Werner, who graduated from Stanford two years ago with a master’s degree in industrial engineering, denied asking that question but said he did ask some students, both male and female, whether they would advise a colleague to have an abortion if pregnancy would interfere with an important project.

“What I was trying to do was create a charged situation where the person was made to think,” the paper quoted Werner as saying. The article said Werner wanted to find out if the candidates would “go to the end of the world to be a professional.”

He said he didn’t care about their views on abortion.

The paper said Werner asked another woman during an interview if she was “religious.” She quoted him as saying he was trying to determine if she was a “good girl” or a “partyer” and did not care what her religion was.

Stanford spokesman Bob Beyers said Monday that Don Cornwell, head of undergraduate recruitment at Goldman Sachs, offered to go to the school on Wednesday and interview students who talked with Werner. Cornwell, Werner and another Goldman Sachs employee talked with 26 Stanford students Jan. 21 and 22.