Facebook’s Hiring Process Hinders Its Effort to Create a Diverse Workforce

Despite incentivizing recruiters to prioritize women, black and Latino engineering candidates, the department’s demographics have not changed much in the past few years.
Photographer: Denis Allard/REA/Redux

Facebook has put itself at the forefront of efforts to recruit a more diverse workforce, including a targeted internal recruiting strategy in 2015 designed to bring in female, black and Latino software engineers.

Yet within Facebook’s engineering department, the push has been hampered by a multi-layered hiring process that gives a small committee of high-ranking engineers veto power over promising candidates, frustrating recruiters and hindering progress on diversity goals.