I recall hearing about someone I knew who didn't get a job because he failed a drug test. Very smart kid, perfectly qualified, but for the test he would have been hired. I thought this was unfair, and the practice was counter-productive for the company following it. I may have even used the word "bullshit."
Someone else defended the idea of using a drug test as relevant information for a new hire. (Neither of us were in a capacity of making hiring decisions, for this individual or anyone else.) He agreed that casual drug use doesn't impair your ability to work. At any rate, if you can directly monitor someone's work performance, you don't need to know an irrelevant detail that might or might not affect someone's work performance. He even agreed that the correlation between drug use and performance is probably poor. So it's not even useful as a signal that someone is "the kind of person who generally makes a bad employee," much less actually causing poor performance. So what was his defense of the practice? Something like, "You're just supposed to know that it's the kind of thing you don't do before a job interview."
There may be some truth to this. It's pretty dumb to finish your college career and enter the field as a job candidate knowing that a drug test will come back dirty. So maybe it is a signal of poor judgment after all? My response to this argument is that it's only a signal of poor judgment if everyone agrees that it's a signal of poor judgment. Many rules of etiquette work this way. Some are perfectly innocuous. Some are downright useful: respect people's personal space, don't make people feel uncomfortable with overly-crude language, don't look distracted during a meeting with a colleague. But some are out-of-date and need to go. Before enforcing or endorsing a social norm, think hard about whether it's actually helpful. If Bob is using too much crude language too loudly and is annoying his neighbors, Bob should probably be reprimanded for creating an unpleasant environment. That's a fairly obvious case where enforcing the norm makes everyone else's lives a little better. "Take your hat off when you get to the office" is more neutral. What to do with this one? Unless there are die-hard hat enthusiasts, enforcing it doesn't really do much harm. But the drug test thing seems like it's in a different category. The company that drug tests is imposing much larger restrictions the lives of its potential employees. If you didn't snoop into someone's blood or urine for traces of their hobby, nobody would know. And even if you do snoop, most people won't care.
I think it's worse than that. Enforcing this norm is socially costly. We'd all be better off if everyone dropped the expectation and stopped drug testing. But maybe you can continue to benefit at everyone else's expense if others are dropping the expectation. Job candidates who fastidiously cohere to all conceivable expectations are probably at least slightly better than job candidates who flout norms. So maybe you can maintain a very slight edge in snatching up the top candidates, but it comes at the cost of keeping a bad social norm in play. We should all strive to stop doing this. Let's leave the world better than we found it.
I can think of other things. Mild swearing (in an interview or at work)? Let it slide, unless it gets truly vulgar or obnoxious. Someone has a single beer at a work lunch? So what? Again, let it slide, unless they are actually getting intoxicated. Someone isn't dressing to the "business casual" standards of your workplace? Again, if it's truly distracting say something, but if it's a violation of routinely-flouted Regulation 17.B.III.d of the official workplace dress guidelines, let it go.
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