Efforts to hire more women and people of color at Uber Technologies Inc. have been long hindered by a peculiar constraint. Members of the recruiting team were denied access to information about the company’s diversity makeup, according to several people familiar with Uber’s hiring apparatus.
The recruiting arm assigns some members to focus on hiring diverse candidates, an initiative that has received enthusiastic endorsements from Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick. But the team found it difficult to do its job without demographic data, which is a common way to identify a company’s weaknesses and set hiring targets, the people said. Like many of its Silicon Valley cohorts, Uber is an obsessively data-driven company, where recruiters log every interaction with candidates and scour their social media profiles. The diversity data limitation was especially vexing because other technology companies of its size release annual diversity reports to the public.
