Google has axed its hiring targets to create more diverse, equitable and inclusive teams, following similar moves by Meta.
In an email to staff seen by the Wall Street Journal, Google said it would no longer set hiring targets to improve representation in its workforce.
In 2020, following the police killing of George Floyd, Google set a target of increasing the proportion of “leadership representation of underrepresented groups” by 30 per cent by 2025.
Google’s 2024 diversity report said 5.7 per cent of its US employees were Black and 7.5 per cent were Latino. Four years earlier, those figures were 3.7 per cent and 5.9 per cent, respectively.
Google also said in the email it was evaluating whether it would continue releasing its annual diversity reports as well as DEI-related grants, training and initiatives, including those that the email said “raise risk, or that aren’t as impactful as we’d hoped.”
The search giant added it was reviewing recent court decisions and executive orders by President Trump aimed at curbing DEI in the government and federal contractors. The company is “evaluating changes to our programs required to comply,” the email said.
The company said it would continue opening and expanding offices in cities with diverse workforces.
“We’ll continue to invest in states across the U.S.—and in many countries globally—but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals,” the email said.
Fiona Cicconi, the company’s chief people officer, said in the email that the company has “always been committed to creating a workplace where we hire the best people wherever we operate, create an environment where everyone can thrive, and treat everyone fairly. That’s exactly what you can expect to see going forward.”
A global spokesperson for Google told B&T the company was “committed” to ensuring all its “employees can succeed and have equal opportunities”.
“Over the last year we’ve been reviewing our programs designed to help us get there. We’ve updated our 10-k language to reflect this, and as a federal contractor, our teams are also evaluating changes required following recent court decisions and executive orders on this topic,” they added.
The move follows a similar decision taken by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. In addition to scrapping the company’s third-party fact-checking service and switching to a Community Notes-style system for content moderation, the company scrapped its DEI hiring policies.
“We build the best teams with the most talented people,” Meta’s vice-president of human resources Janelle Gale wrote in a memo to staff. “This means sourcing people from a range of candidate pools, but never making hiring decisions based on protected characteristics (eg race, gender etc.).
“Instead of equity and inclusion programs,” Gale wrote, Meta plans to build programs “that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background.”
However, Meta’s local office told B&T that it would not necessarily be following suit.
“This doesn’t change our approach to hiring diverse teams in our workforce, which include people from different races, sexuality, political views and so on because we believe diverse teams perform better,” the spokesperson said.
“We continue to believe in having a multi-talented workforce made up of cognitively diverse teams. We will always value teams with differences in knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. They are better at innovating, solving complex problems and identifying new opportunities, ultimately helping us deliver on our ambition to build products that serve everyone.
“We have never hired talent on the basis of race, sexuality and other identity characteristics, and this will continue.”
Google provided no update on the local operations to B&T.
