Sounds illegal. Via WSJ:
YouTube last year stopped hiring white and Asian males for technical positions because they didn’t help the world’s largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity, according to a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee.
The lawsuit, filed by Arne Wilberg, a white male who worked at Google for nine years, including four years as a recruiter at YouTube, alleges the division of Alphabet Inc.’s Google set quotas for hiring minorities. Last spring, YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories, the lawsuit claims.
A Google spokeswoman said the company will vigorously defend itself in the lawsuit. “We have a clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity,” she said in a statement. “At the same time, we unapologetically 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.”
People familiar with YouTube’s and Google’s hiring practices in interviews corroborated some of the lawsuit’s allegations, including the hiring freeze of white and Asian technical employees, and YouTube’s use of quotas. […]
Recruiters used what was known internally as a “diversity tracker,” to track minority hiring, the people familiar with hiring practices at YouTube and Google said. For the week of March 20, 2017, for example, the team tracked a year-to-date goal of 21 African-American hires, with one actually hired in that period, according to an internal YouTube email attached as an exhibit to the lawsuit. […]
YouTube allegedly tried to cover up the hiring practices in two instances, according to the complaint and a person familiar with the matter. In January 2016, Mr. Wilberg alleges, he was told in a meeting that YouTube had to “clean up” its diversity hiring practices, and that managers deleted all email messages about those goals. Sometime in mid-2017, YouTube told recruiting staff to stop tracking the number of hires from minority groups and instructed them not to make hiring decisions based on diversity status, according to the lawsuit and a person familiar with the matter.
