Google is being sued by an ex-recruiter who claims discriminatory hiring practices--how should diversity factor into hiring?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/ex-google-recruiter-i-was-fired-because-i-resisted-illegal-diversity-efforts/
Arne Wilberg, a 40-year-old white man who worked as a recruiter for YouTube for seven years, is suing Google (YouTube’s parent company) over wrongful termination after he resisted Google’s hiring practices, which he claims discriminate against white and Asian men.
Wilberg says he was told by his manager at one point to “immediately cancel all…software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black, or Hispanic”. He refused to comply with this and similar practices and was eventually terminated.
Google has pushed back against the claims and says that it has a “clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity” but they “try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.”
White and Asian men are notably overrepresented in the tech industry. But the way to gain a more diverse workforce to is to invest in educational opportunities among minority communities to ensure that they are as qualified as their white and Asian counterparts when they apply, not to exclude more qualified candidates because they are part of an overrepresented demographic.
According to Wired, California law does not prohibit diversification as a goal, but it does prohibit demographic quotas. Diversification of a workforce can’t be done through quotas. So how can it be done? And how urgent of a goal is it?
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Google (infamous for smart-ass interview questions for software engineers) ought to be able to solve that problem – it’s not a very hard problem to solve without quotas, at all. Colleges have been doing it for decades. For example, you can just have a selection formula that gives a rough value for how attractive an applicant is, and one of the positive factors can be diversity as measured by whatever ways the law allows.
Let’s be clear: he wasn’t fired for hiring only white and Asian people. He was fired for not following the directive of his manager.
And, it will play out in court if he was or was not interviewing women or minorities other than Asian.
I don’t think there is a simple answer. I’m of two minds about preferential hiring practices in a field which is largely entered into by white and Asian men. I think as you do that the problem should be addressed earlier. Eventually, as more and more women and people of color are encouraged to enter STEM fields, there will be more diversity. Perhaps companies like Google should (maybe they do?) be sponsoring programs and internships for high school students from varying socio-economic groups.
My sons both work in CS and one of them is responsible for hiring in his department. I haven’t discussed with him what the criteria used for hiring are, but we have talked about discrimination in the workplace. He has told me of ways he seeks to hire and integrate women comfortably in the workplace and the awareness he has as a parent of work-life balance.
I have a hard spot with “diversity” goals. The whole idea of diversity is that you accept each other as they are. When someone starts using “diversity” to mean they have to use people of certain sexes or races, you aren’t accepting them as they are, you are inflating their importance because of this trait and you are stoking either racism or sexism. If you want the best employees in a company, you look at the resumes and choose the best on paper and then do the interviews. If someone that is black or hispanic or homosexual or female or any other division of society and they don’t make the cut…too bad. That is how it goes sometimes.
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