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Google is being sued by an ex-recruiter who claims discriminatory hiring practices--how should diversity factor into hiring?
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March 4th, 2018
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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