Google reported its best year yet for hiring Black employees, but rising departures of the same group highlight risk to the company’s plan to double its Black workforce, reports Bloomberg.
The company said 8.8 percent of Google’s U.S. hires were “Black+,” compared with 5.5 percent the previous year, representing the largest gain among all racial groups. Attrition, however, also increased among Black employees and other racial minority groups, with Black women having the highest jump in the metric. The company uses the plus designation to include people who identify as multiple races.
Google made a big push to hire more Black employees last year after the police murder of George Floyd sparked worldwide protests in support of racial justice. The company pledged in October to double the number of “Black+” Googlers by 2025, and by the same year, wants to increase people from underrepresented groups in senior roles by 30 percent. The Internet giant was one of the first tech companies to compile a diversity report, in 2014, but has shown slow progress in changing the racial and gender diversity of its staff despite rapidly expanding its workforce since then.
