Facebook did not hire Black employees because they were not a 'culture fit,' report says

[Dr. Acula]

Facebook did not hire Black employees because they were not a 'culture fit,' report says
Yelena Dzhanova
19 hours ago

Christoph Dernbach/picture alliance via Getty Images

• Three Black people allege Facebook chose not to hire them because they weren't a "culture fit."
• "There's no doubt you can do the job," a manager said before using the culture-fit line, a report says.
• Critics have criticized the idea of a "culture fit," arguing it sidelines people of color.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

After initial reports of Facebook turning down Black applicants for positions because they weren't a "culture fit," more people have filed complaints alleging similar experiences.

A Washington Post article published Tuesday said three Black applicants were rejected from jobs at Facebook despite having met all the qualifications.

The three applicants filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency that investigates workplace discrimination.

"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 Facebook operations manager, Oscar Veneszee Jr., told the paper he believes several qualified applicants he referred to jobs at the company were rejected because they weren't a "culture fit."

"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," he told The Post. "But unfortunately not many people I knew could pass that challenge because the culture here does not reflect the culture of Black people."

The EEOC began investigating Facebook last summer over bias allegations, The Post added.

Critics have criticized workplaces pursuing the idea of a "culture fit" in their hiring practices because, they argue, it creates an inclination to hire white workers while sidelining people of color.

In a 2018 article published by the Society for Human Resource Management, a professional membership association in Alexandria, Virginia, one HR expert said "culture fit" is subjective and indicates the hiring decision is largely not based "on the candidate's ability to deliver results."

A Facebook spokesperson, when reached for comment, gave the following statement.

"We've added diversity and inclusion goals to senior leaders' performance reviews. We take seriously allegations of discrimination and have robust policies and processes in place for employees to report concerns, including concerns about microaggressions and policy violations," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson also said the company did not take "culture fit" into account when hiring for jobs.

Rhett Lindsey, a former recruiter with Facebook, told The Post, "There is no culture fit check mark on an application form, but at Facebook it is like this invisible cloud that hangs over candidates of color."

 

[Deuterion]

It’s probably a bunch of whites and Asians.

 

[Dr. Acula]

I hope this breh is in touch with a lawyer

"There's no doubt you can do the job," a manager said before using the culture-fit line, a report says.

 

[Dr. Acula]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/06/facebook-discrimination-hiring-bias/

A recruiter joined Facebook to help it meet its diversity targets. He says its hiring practices hurt people of color.
The recruiter quit after 11 months, adding fuel to claims that it discriminates against Black applicants

Rhett Lindsey, 32, founder and CEO of Siimee, a new app designed to eliminate bias in recruitment, poses for a portrait in Los Angeles on March 24. (Philip Cheung for The Washington Post)
By
Elizabeth Dwoskin and
Nitasha Tiku
April 6, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Rhett Lindsey was so eager to work at Facebook, he applied for a job there three times. When he finally got the offer to become a recruiter for highly paid engineers, he says he jumped at the chance to help the social network push for greater employee diversity in its ranks.


Eight months later, in August 2020, Lindsey attended a virtual meeting to discuss the company’s goal of hiring more Black engineers. In the meeting, a White manager played a Drake song in the background whose chorus repeats the phrase “Where the [n-word]s be at?," five times, according to videos of the incident reviewed by The Washington Post.

Lindsey asked in the chat system why they were playing the song, then said he was “really disappointed,” according to the video. Nine other employees who were present in the meeting echoed his frustrations by putting emoji expressing shock alongside his comment.

“It shows you the insensitivity and the lack of awareness,” Lindsey said. A manager subsequently apologized, according to the video.

The country was in the midst of a historic reckoning over racial justice, and Facebook had just set an ambitious hiring goal of 30 percent more people of color in leadership by 2025.

But Lindsey and other current and former Black employees involved in hiring — as well as potential recruits who filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last summer — describe a problematic system that makes it difficult to achieve that and other diversity goals. They say the company has adapted 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 terms 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.

EEOC complaint alleges that Facebook is biased against black workers

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said the company is focused on advancing racial justice in the workplace and in recruiting. “We’ve added diversity and inclusion goals to senior leaders’ performance reviews. We take seriously allegations of discrimination and have robust policies and processes in place for employees to report concerns, including concerns about microaggressions and policy violations,” he said. He did not address the incident involving the Drake song.

Lindsey quit the company in November, just 11 months after he started, and has since founded a start-up.

Facebook is facing a federal investigation by the EEOC that launched last summer into allegations of bias in hiring, promotion and pay, according to the complaint. That case has since been expanded into a systemic probe by the EEOC, a special designation which means that the federal agency is examining whether company practices may be contributing to widespread discrimination and is assessing the potential to bring a broader lawsuit representing an entire class of workers, according to the lawyers representing the complainants.

The EEOC declined to comment. The agency can only speak publicly about charges if they result in a lawsuit against the employer.


In the EEOC complaint, three Black job applicants say they met all the advertised job qualifications but were rejected after going through the interview process. They say they were told by Facebook interviewers that the company was looking for people who would fit in culturally. One candidate, whose lawyer requested The Washington Post withhold her name because parts of the complaint are not public, was told by a Facebook hiring manager, “There’s no doubt you can do the job, but we’re really looking for a culture fit,” but was not given any further explanation.


Culture fit is an ill-defined term for whether a candidate is a good match for a company’s internal culture.

A Facebook operations manager who is identified in the complaint, Oscar Veneszee Jr., who is Black and still works at Facebook, said in an interview that he had submitted more than half a dozen qualified applicants who were underrepresented minorities for jobs at Facebook, but that all were rejected and he suspected it was because they failed the cultural fit test.


“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 find people who were a culture fit,” he said. “But unfortunately not many people I knew could pass that challenge because the culture here does not reflect the culture of Black people.”


Facebook’s Stone said the company’s recruiters do not assess cultural fit, but the company looks for whether skills and behaviors in the interview process, such as responses to questions about what a person might do in a particular scenario, align with Facebook’s values.

“There is no culture fit check mark on an application form, but at Facebook it is like this invisible cloud that hangs over candidates of color,” said Lindsey. He added that at least a dozen qualified candidates of color that he referred for interviews were also rejected by Facebook, with culture fit was part of those decisions. “It really boils down to who do I feel comfortable hanging out with.”


Racial issues at Facebook have been particularly acute over the last year because of the decision by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to give wide latitude to racially divisive comments by President Trump during last summers’ protests, and because of the company’s role in providing a platform for extremist groups that espouse white supremacist ideas. The decision to leave up Trump’s comment was of particular concern to workers of color, some of whom met personally with senior leaders to protest the decision while others have left the company. Facebook software engineer Ashok Chandwaney quit publicly in the fall, citing unease with the social media giant’s role in fueling hate.


Zuckerberg’s decision “created such lack of psychological safety on all kinds of levels, and Black employees in particular didn’t know how to truly process that,” said a former Black executive who cited the decision as one of her reasons for resigning.

Another Facebook worker quits in disgust, saying the company ‘is on the wrong side of history’

Facebook is one of the several Silicon Valley companies, including Google and Microsoft, to announce ambitious diversity targets in the wake of the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed while in police custody. But years of annual tech companies’ diversity reports show only incremental progress on increasing the ratio of Black and Latino employees, and high attrition rates among Black women, supported by recent accounts of racial bias and inequities in pay and promotion from Black women at Google, Pinterest and Amazon.


Google’s leadership is more than 95 percent White or Asian and 73 percent male, and Facebook’s is more than 87 percent White or Asian and 66 percent male, according to the companies’ 2020 diversity reports.


The independent civil rights auditors Facebook hired to scrutinize its record last summer found attrition was of concern to employees of color and to civil rights advocates, and noted a “disconnect” between the experiences described by employees of color and the company’s myriad diversity and inclusion initiatives. In the report, which was made public by Facebook, auditors also called the company’s permissive stance on politicians’ speech a “tremendous setback” for its civil rights progress, saying such decisions were made by members of senior leadership who lacked civil rights expertise.

 

[kevm3]

This is one of the reasons why I say don't be deceived by your 'liberal allies'. These tech companies will scream about LGBT all day and you can't criticize them at all, but the minute you start posting positive black things, you get banned and you can post stuff talking down on blacks all day. At best, these companies will give you the symbolic gestures of making a post about "Black Lives Matter", but never end up hiring any blacks.

 

[ORDER_66]

these tech companies DO NOT WANT black folks gaining a foothold in the tech industry its plain as day.... all these excuses is bullshyt and they know it... white or asians only... talking about CULTURE fit, you mean WHITE culture... probably anti black too while they at it

 

[Double Burger With Cheese]

In before the go along to get along ass nikkas come in here taking about cutting dreads and “playing the game”

 

[The D-List Vet]

these tech companies DO NOT WANT black folks gaining a foothold in the tech industry its plain as day.... all these excuses is bullshyt and they know it... white or asians only... talking about CULTURE fit, you mean WHITE culture... probably anti black too while they at it

we have a breh in the bay area who speaks on this.

 

[Ukbrotha]

Absolutely this was expected. I mean Zuck doesnt come up with facebook and he would have probably been a school shooter.

 

[The Fade]

Peter Thiel is on its board.. what do you expect

 

[Tom Foolery]

Just get the lawsuits going. They don't learn until their ass is in court.

 

[Zero]

At best, these companies will give you the symbolic gestures of making a post about "Black Lives Matter", but never end up hiring any blacks.

Iridescent blackness
Is this performative or praxis?
Are we talkin' bout practice? (We talkin' bout practice man )

 

[ORDER_66]

Peter Thiel is on its board.. what do you expect

why does that name sound so familiar????

 

[Vilify]

This is very real!

I know someone who got the same exact response from Facebook. He's a computer programmer, super smart with solid work history. He was told he didn't fit company culture. He didn't think it was anything racial though. He felt it's because he wore a suit and tie and maybe a bit too serious. He says the interview was quirky and a completely different vibe than he's ever experienced.

 

[ORDER_66]

This is very real!

I know someone who got the same exact response from Facebook. He's a computer programmer, super smart with solid work history. He was told he didn't fit company culture. He didn't think it was anything racial though. He felt it's because he wore a suit and tie and maybe a bit too serious. He says the interview was quirky and a completely different vibe than he's ever experienced.

"CULTURE" is definitely going in the keyword of white racism same way that politician Steve King said "Western Civilization" now its coming out in the wash...