By Nitasha Tiku
For years, Google's recruiting department used a college ranking system to set budgets and priorities for hiring new engineers. Some schools such as Stanford University and MIT were predictably in the "elite" category, while state schools or institutions that churn out thousands of engineering grads annually, such as Georgia Tech, were assigned to "tier 1" or "tier 2."
But one category of higher education was missing from Google's ranking system, according to several current and former Google employees involved in recruitment, despite the company's pledges to promote racial diversity - historically Black colleges and universities, also known as HBCUs. That framework meant that those schools were at a lower priority for hiring, even though Google had said in 2014 that it wanted to partner with HBCUsas a way to recruit more minority talent.
In lieu of a tier, Google's University Programs recruiting division, responsible for forging partnerships with universities, labeled these colleges "long tail" schools, in reference to the fact that it could take a long time before these universities would produce a large number of graduates qualified to work at Google, according to the Google employees.
"Google allocated resources so disparagingly because of how they tiered - and thought of - our schools," said former recruiter April Christina Curley, who helped lead Google's outreach to HBCUs for six years. Curley, who is Black, said she was fired in September largely as a result of continually raising concerns about bias against HBCU students in the interview and hiring process.
Google for years has been celebrated as trying to fix Silicon Valley's race gap, with praise highlighting the company's efforts to build relationships with HBCUs. But while Google had a head start, it also undervalued and underinvested in Black engineering students at HBCUs, according to interviews with Curley and seven current and former Google workers, HBCU graduates, former faculty members, emails, planning documents and performance reviews. Some of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.
Now critics are challenging Google to address its treatment of HBCU students - and to reexamine assumptions about the pipeline for Black technical talent that were replicated across the industry as competitors copied Google's approach.
Google spokeswoman Jennifer Rodstrom said in a statement, "We have a large team of recruiters who work incredibly hard to increase the hiring of Black+ and other underrepresented talent at Google, including a dedicated team that partners and strengthens our relationships with HBCUs." Rodstrom noted that Google hired interns and full-time employees from 19 HBCUs in 2019 in both technical and nontechnical roles.
Rodstrom added, "We don't agree with the way April describes her termination, but it's not appropriate for us to provide a commentary about her claims."
Google's outreach to HBCUs, including its high-profile partnership with Washington D.C.'s Howard University, relied on volunteer efforts from Google engineers and smaller budgets compared with those of recruiters for elite institutions, according to Curley and the other current and former employees. Google's 2020 budget for its marquee program of hosting students at its Mountain View, Calif., campus was $1.3 million, spread across 10 HBCUs and Hispanic-serving institutions.
Last summer, as Black Lives Matters protesters marched in cities throughout the country, Google's recruiting department agreed to stop using the ranking system, after about a dozen of the company's college recruiters, all of whom were Black, argued that the policy perpetuated racial bias, according to a June letter that the recruiters sent to Google's head of human resources and that was viewed by The Washington Post. But Curley said that is unlikely to reverse a pattern that started years ago.
In late January, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai spoke with five HBCU presidents, who requested the meeting after Curley tweeted about the bias she says she faced trying to advocate for HBCU students, Morgan State University President David Wilson told The Post. Since then, Google has announced an initiative to train 100,000 Black women in digital skills and a new initiative to help HBCU students gain skills while pursuing careers in tech. Last June, Pichai committed more than $175 million to promote racial equity, as part of a pledge to increase to Black representation at Google.
In interviews, current and former HBCU administrators, computer science faculty members and engineering students told The Post that Google's efforts had helped modernize their computer science curriculum and better prepare students for working in Silicon Valley. But some school officials said they were not surprised that an uptick in internships had not led to a comparable rise injob offers.
"What I continue to see with Google is showboating," in the form of donations or announcing new programs, rather than reassessing its approach, Nicole Tinson, the chief executive officer of HBCU 20x20, a network for seeking jobs and internships, told The Post. In December, Tinson canceled HBCU 20x20′s partnership with Google, including several planned 2021 mock-interview events, after Curley's tweets.
Tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple began a public push to increase the representation of Black employees in their engineering ranks in 2014, when the industry first disclosed the race and gender demographics of its workforce.
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Silicon Valley long recruited tech talent from Stanford and MIT. But HBCUs also have thriving engineering programs. In 2014, four of the six schools producing the most Black graduates with a bachelor's degree in computer science were HBCUs, according to a report from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE).
Tech companies' sales, marketing and public relations departments also lagged behind in race representation, The Post reported in 2015. But public scrutiny has focused on diversity in technical roles, because of the power and wealth afforded to engineers inside company hierarchies and the influence they can have on products, services and policies affecting billions of users around the globe.
From the beginning, Google touted its strategy to hire more Black engineers by forging stronger ties with HBCUs. Curley joined Google's team of University Programs recruiters in 2014 to help shape the HBCU outreach strategy. At the time, the 16-year-old company had not hired a single HBCU computer science graduate into an entry-level software engineer role, according to a 2013 document. The document also showed that Google believed partnering with these schools would provide a return on investment, because HBCUs awarded more than 35% of the bachelor's degrees earned by Black students in computer science in the United States.
That document was a proposal to partner with Howard University - called Project Bison, named after the school's mascot. Google would send an engineer to the campus to teach an introductory computer science class, because the company believed the curriculum at HBCUs was inadequate.
"HBCU CS students struggle with the most basic of coding, algorithms and data structures," the document said.
According to the document, Google planned to revamp Howard's entire computer science curriculum as a way to build a stronger pool of Black applicants and "increase pass-through rates into Google early pipeline programs, internships and new grad opportunities."
Google worried that the HBCU curriculum, which focused on the programming language C++, was too theoretical. The company wanted to prepare students for software engineering roles in Silicon Valley by learning Python, a more widely used programming language, and project-based learning, according to the document and interviews with employees and HBCU faculty members.
The Google software engineers who taught the classes volunteered to spend 20% to 50% of their time teaching on campus, while still fulfilling their regular job duties.The budget for the pilot test was $40,000 for the instructor's housing, flight, and meals, with $12,000 set aside to fund WiFi in the classroom and Chromebooks so that students could access the material out of the classroom.
"The first step is to help Howard students meet the Google bar - it's also the right thing to do for the future of diversity in technology," the document said. "With this huge percentage of the pool currently not hirable, we need to look at ways to impact change in the HBCU system."
The pilot session of Project Bison, later renamed Google in Residence, was successful, with 10 of the 60 Howard students granted internships, and Google mentioned it in its first blog post announcing its diversity numbers. Curley said Google tasked her and two other Black women in University Programs with building a strategy around the program, which still relies on engineers volunteering their time. Google's Rodstrom said Google in Residence has reached more than 4,000 students to date and is currently available at nine HBCUs and three Hispanic-serving institutions, known as HSIs.
In 2017, Google expanded the program to bring HBCU faculty members and students to Google's headquarters, with a pilot project first called Howard West, later renamed Tech Exchange. The students took courses taught by HBCU faculty members and Google engineers, attended weekly practice interviews and met with mentors on the Google campus.
Maya Nichols, a senior at Howard majoring in computer science who is set to graduate in May, spent the 2018-2019 academic year in Mountain View as part of Google's Tech Exchange, even appearing in a promotional video for the program. She said she gained a lot from the experience and believes the cost was worth it, even though she had to take out a $10,000 loan from Howard to pay for her housing costs.
Nichols has not had contact with the engineer assigned to be her mentor since she left Google. She applied for a research internship in human-computer interaction advertised in a Google newsletter, but Google recently rejected her by email.
In a statement, Howard spokeswoman Alonda Thomas said, "Since 2017, Howard University has worked with Google to build a mutually beneficial pipeline where students from diverse backgrounds can experience the industry first-hand while pursuing their education in computer science." She said Google has hired 119 interns and 30 new college grads from Howard since the program began. Rodstrom said 97% of students in the most recent class rated themselves "a better programmer" after completing the program.
Although Howard West garnered a lot of press for Google - The Post reported on it in 2017 - tuition for the pilot program was paid for by Howard and private donors. Thomas said that after the initial pilot cohort in 2017, students were responsible for covering tuition, housing and incidentals, although a stipend was provided to some students to pay for housing. That contrasts with some of Google's competitors, such as Apple, which began a scholarship program for HBCU students in 2015.
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Although the Project Bison proposal framed the issue as lack of proper training inside HBCUs, Curley and other former employees said aspects of Google's internal hiring processes also prevented Black technical talent from being hired.
Résumé screeners and sourcers "were screening out my kids left and right because they didn't know the [HBCU] school name or what a 'Divine Nine' fraternity and sorority meant," she said. The trio of HBCU recruiters tried to negotiate, pushing teams to at least interview qualified candidates or asking hiring committees to reconsider feedback about how an HBCU student was not a "culture fit" for Google. Rodstrom said Google stopped hiring for "culture fit" in 2017 and now looks for candidates who are a "culture add."
To mitigate some of those issues, documents show, Curley developed an outreach program called PEP Talkafter seeing some interns reject return offers and get bad performance reviews. The sessions involved technical questions, talking about what Google's databases looked like, how to manage the money they were receiving and how to set up one-on-ones with a manager.
But around 2016, Curley said, Google began bristling at this individualized approach, seeing it as giving HBCU students an unfair advantage. Curley pointed out that schools such as Stanford has offered formal classes on preparing for technical interviews and also have a culture in which familiarity with these practices is the norm. She was asked to expand the series to HSIs, which were also labeled "long-tail schools," then women's colleges. In 2020, Google instructed Curley to shut down the program, she said, because her HBCU priorities should focus on increasing applications.
Curley and two other Black female recruiters struggled to get more resources for HBCUs, including being denied requests from schools for updated laptops and technology, Google employees said. And the university partnershipsdepartment, which was dominated by White women, at times seemed to interpret advocacy from three Black women as aggression, Curley said. "The University Programs team budget is not reflective of our HBCU hiring efforts as a whole," Rodstrom said.
Mimi Fox Melton, the acting CEO of Code2040, a nonprofit group working to improve representation of Black and Latino people in tech, said she noticed an abrupt shift away from programs designed to promote equity after the 2016 presidential election. "Tech companies were concerned about not poking the presidential bear or wanting to appease their far-right employees," she said.
In 2017, Google engineer James Damore's 10-page memo criticizing Google's diversity efforts became a national news story after he was fired. The memo pointed to Google internships and programs for Black and HBCU students as examples of "discriminatory practices" that favored minorities.
According to an NBC News report last year, Google began rolling back diversity and inclusion programs in 2018 to avoid appearing anti-conservative.
Rodstrom, the Google spokeswoman, said in a statement: "Any suggestion that we have scaled back or cut our diversity efforts is entirely false. Diversity, equity, and inclusion remains a company wide commitment and our programs are continuing to scale up."
The internal fight for resources remained largely invisible as Google and its competitors accompanied their annual diversity reports with pledges to spend tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on diversity recruiting.
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The term "long tail" to describe certain schools fell out of favor in 2019, according to Curley. Toward the end of her time at Google, Curley said, the company wanted to pull back from HBCUs and instead focus on hiring more Black candidates from the schools they already recruited from, as well as HSIs, which produce a larger number of computer science graduates each year, according to data from ASEE.
In 2019, for example, after four years of hosting Google in Residence at Dillard University, an HBCU in New Orleans, Google shut down the program. Curley said she was told by her manager that Google no longer wanted to invest in Dillard.
Dennis Sigur, a Dillard computer science instructor, said the outcome left him confused. But he said he was not disappointed, noting that Dillard alumni had received internship offers and participated in Google's Tech Exchange program. Google did not hire any Dillard graduates into full-time roles after graduation, but some got offers from Google once they had already worked at other tech companies, said Sigur.
"Sometimes the students get discouraged - everybody wants to work for Google," he said. "Many people who are part of [Google's outreach efforts] don't look like the students, so they don't have a thorough understanding of the struggles of HBCU students."
Curley said she felt that Google's decision not to "invest any longer in Dillard because they were not producing hires" was shortsighted. Partnering with HBCUs worked, but it could take time, Curley said. "The kids had grown in other ways that were important."
According to comments from Curley's manager on her performance review last year, 60 people hired for technical roles from HBCUs in 2019 came from the portfolio of schools managed by Curley.
"It almost feels like Google doesn't want to believe that they've been wrong," said Hallie Lomax, a software engineer at Lyft who was part of the first class of students at Howard to participate in Google in Residence, "even with all the efforts that people like April make in trying to prove that they have some blind spots in recognizing talent."
The Washington Post