An alleged former hiring manager at Microsoft’s AI Platform division claims he felt pressured to hire people for important roles at the company based on racial requirements, overlooking other qualified candidates because they would not count towards Microsoft’s diversity goals, imposed from above by the company’s “Diversity and Inclusion” department.
The alleged insider’s story was published by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), with the author using a pen name to conceal their identity. Extracts from the story follow.
In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, Bill Gates, left, meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, Friday, June 16, 2023. (Yin Bogu/Xinhua via AP)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (Jason Redmond/ Getty)
Via CSPI:
You might think that a company that spent time writing a mission statement would ask employees to focus on its mission (Microsoft’s is “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more”). But every Microsoft employee instead is told that D&I must be a “core priority,” and that they should write about that first, and then “briefly” discuss their own additional priorities. Below is the text shown to employees:
When I initially saw this, I thought I would just write something anodyne and get back to focusing on producing great software for our users. But I soon learned that there was more to Microsoft’s commitment to D&I than making me write some text that was only visible to my manager every few months. I received an email from my corporate vice president (2 hops below the CEO), requiring all managers and employees above a certain level to publicly share our personal D&I plans.
I soon learned that if I wanted to get promoted, visibly announcing my commitment to D&I wasn’t enough. The corporate vice president who sent that email had to approve all promotions within his organization above a certain level, and it was made clear to me that he weighed contributions to D&I very heavily when making those decisions, and that he encouraged lower levels of management to do the same.
The hiring manager claims he was instructed that in order to fill any position at Microsoft in the U.S., he would have to interview one black, hispanic, or latin candidate and one female candidate before making a decision.
While the insider concedes that there are no formal quotas, he describes an atmosphere of implicit incentives to hire candidates or promote employees with the “right” ethnicity or gender. According to the insider, Microsoft’s HR team double-checked with him to make sure he had considered a “diverse” candidate for promotion.
“There was no quota, but it seemed clear that promoting this person would have made HR and my corporate vice president happy,” wrote the insider.
The insider said he felt the same invisible pressure during the hiring process.
“I spent months waiting for a single person to apply who fulfilled the racial requirement. When no one did, I spent hours trying to find people on LinkedIn who I thought might count as black or Hispanic based on their name or resume. Sadly, during these months I had many very qualified internal candidates applying for the role, but I couldn’t hire them. Unable to hire, my team became a bottleneck that delayed several projects integrating AI into Microsoft products.”
Breitbart News requested comment from Microsoft on this story.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.