April 7, 2021
April 7, 2021
The Washington Post and is reporting on additional allegations of biased hiring practices at Facebook.
Facebook is already under investigation for biased hiring practices by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In July of 2020, operations program manager Oscar Veneszee Jr., along two applicants denied jobs, brought a charge to the EEOC, and a third rejected applicant joined the case in December. They charge that Facebook routinely rejects fully qualified black candidates for vague reasons around "cultural fit". The company now faces additional scrutiny, as the EEOC has defined the probe as “systemic". This designation moves the company under a microscope, and likely triggers a full audit of recruiting and hiring practices.
"There's no doubt you can do the job, but we're really looking for a culture fit," one hiring manager told one of the three candidates, according to The Post.
A full audit of ATS, HRIS, CRM, and anything touching recruiting and candidate/ applicant handling is likely happening or imminent. {RNN has reached out to Facebook for a statement, and will update accordingly].
A former Facebook recruiter named Rhett Lindsey quit the company after 11 months, this past November. His reasons for resigning were driven by what he felt was systemic racism across the company.
Lindsey and others tell the Post that Facebook: "adopted metrics that prompt recruiters to go through the motions without actually delivering talent. Even the diverse candidates who are brought in can be rejected over vague concepts such as 'cultural fit.' They also say that the problem goes deeper than hiring and that many employees of color feel alienated by the social network’s culture." He describes a recruiting team meeting where a white manager played a Drake song which repeats the chorus: “Where the [n-word]s be at?" five times.
According to the Post article, when reached for comment, Veneszee said: "When I was interviewing at Facebook, the thing I was told constantly was that I needed to be a culture fit, and when I tried to recruit people, I knew I needed [to] find people who were a culture fit. But unfortunately not many people I knew could pass that challenge because the culture here does not reflect the culture of Black people."
Veneszee, a Navy veteran who has been part of Facebook's diversity-recruiting initiative, told NPR in July of 2020:
"We have a Black people problem. We've set goals to increase diversity at the company, but we've failed to create a culture at the company that finds, grows and keeps Black people at the company."
Culture fit has been criticized regularly as a way to enforce homogeneity - and as a cloak for both conscious as well as unconscious bias. Talent leader Patty McCord in the Harvard Business Review writes that: "Finding the right people is also not a matter of “culture fit.” What most people really mean when they say someone is a good fit culturally is that he or she is someone they’d like to have a beer with. But people with all sorts of personalities can be great at the job you need done. This misguided hiring strategy can also contribute to a company’s lack of diversity, since very often the people we enjoy hanging out with have backgrounds much like our own."