It's sexual harassment. As a male, I would be incredibly uncomfortable if I were in this situation with the genders reversed. Picture: you're interviewing for a job you're wildly enthusiastic about. The hiring decision lies with an older woman who you are not at all attracted to, and she fires off that line at you. Who would feel comfortable in that situation?
It happened to me multiple times, because I am an attractive male. Having conversations with a female boss like "oh, my shoe is too tight, let's go to my hotel room together to change it" etc. Sometimes I think medieval-style gender separation is the best thing for business...
I wouldnt have any issues with that honestly. We are humans not machines. We say things sometimes that get interpreted as something its not. The comment Mclure made was stupid. But calling it sexism or herrasment as if its some systemic thing seems a tad extreme too.
it's pretty unambiguous what he said. Unless he pulls a Clinton (be skeptical about the definition of "is") there is no way for this to "get interpreted as something its not".
A professional can keep their personal feelings separate from their professional responsibilities. If you feel that the former is compromising the latter, remove yourself from the situation and defer the hiring responsibilities to a colleague.
You can also ask someone else in a non-creepy way, especially by not relating the prospect of getting hired to their response to your sexual overtones (the "I don't know if I should hire you or hit on you" bit).
This isn't rocket science, its common sense and common decency, not to mention being a "professional". McClure's actions in this particularly instance are shady and creepy to the extreme.
A more apt analogy would be if you were a young hetero male not attracted to older females (cougars, in parlance) and she were a loan officer at the bank you want to procure a loan from and she hit on you like that.
It's something you'd likely report to the bank management but it's not workplace sexual harassment (she's not harassing another lower echelon staffer).
Still uncouth and uncalled for and any respectable organization would take corrective action.
[edit] Seeing that that was during staff recruiting process, I can't even imagine how someone would even entertain such a puerile idea in their heads, no less mention it in communication.
There are some people (maybe many) who when they have some power seemingly lose all sense of decency. It's discouraging and boggling.
I know we are way past civics and other classes in school which tried to steer kids into a more "moral" frame of mind, but I think the advent of fraternity culture permeating into daily life beyond secondary education and educational institutions in the educated indicates that something's amiss in our culture.
Music, movies, games, etc., take a pretty jocular view of appropriate behavior --it's not to say there were not predators or other unsavory behavior by people toward others before mass media, but at least in some classes of people it was at least frowned upon whereas now it's openly celebrated with few exceptions.
I think this is a cop-out excuse. Even the frattiest of frat boys have moms, sisters, and girlfriends/wives.
This isn't that complicated, it's simply "treat others how you wish to be treated."
Before you proposition job applicants over Facebook DM just ask yourself: would I be okay with this if someone treated my mom/sister/girlfriend in this manner?
I'm not sure having sisters/wives/moms/brothers/fathers has much effect on people who are reared and imbued in a culture where entertainment (liberally defined) celebrates fraternity culture.
You just have to examine the "shaving cream on mouth and dicks painted on friends faces" attitude to know people do things to others that they _do not_ particularly want done to themselves.
To use a car analogy these are the kinds of people who would be happy to cut someone off while driving but would get enraged if someone did that to them. Of course, it's simple, drive defensively and don't do stupid things when driving --do people follow?
