When April Christina Curley went to bed on the night of September 10, she probably didn’t think she would wake up the next morning and not have a job at Google. But that’s exactly what happened.
According to NBC News, Curley announced in a now viral Twitter thread on Monday she was fired from her role as diversity recruiter at the tech giant, even though she had been “their most successful” recruiter in their company’s history.
Originally set up in 2014 to help improve relationships between Google and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Curley says the company had never hired anyone from an HBCU to fill a technical role before her position. And can anyone here guess why?
Yes, you guessed it. Racism.
Curley then went on to expose a series of unfair and biased recruitment practices that she believed were disproportionately targeted by students at HBCUs, including ‘screening’ resumes of students with ‘unknown’ school / college names, resulting in demeaning and absolutely insulting feedback about students lagged behind. would ultimately result in a rejection at the recruitment committee stage, questioning students in interviews about the quality of the computer science curriculum they received at their HBCU, and criticizing it for ‘falling short of the bar’ compared to ‘elite’ , white settings. “
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“The reason Google never hired an HBCU student straight out of their bachelor’s in any of their major engineering roles is because they didn’t believe that talent existed at these institutions until I showed up,” Curley wrote in a tweet.
During her time working for the company, Curley insists she advocated tirelessly on behalf of HBCU students, even though it has consistently faced backlash from her superiors. And by backlash, she means denying promotion and leadership opportunities, cutting compensation, being placed on performance improvement plans despite praising performance metrics, against yelling, and being intentionally banned from meetings. One white female manager went so far as to tell Curley that her Baltimore accent was a disability that should have been revealed to her peers. All this, she says, ultimately led to her termination from the company.
“I could write DAYS about the terribly racist recruiting and hiring practices I saw at Google, WITH BONNEN,” says Curley added in a tweet. “Take it from ME – their most successful BLACK QUEER WOMAN recruiter who they fired in the middle of an MF pandemic because they were tired of hearing me yelling at them about their racist nonsense.”
Right now, Google is running 0-2 when it comes to their treatment (or rather, mistreatment) of their black employees. Earlier this month, The carrot reported that the company came under scrutiny after news was released of the resignation of another of their top executives, Timnit Gebru. Gebru, who co-led the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team at Google, said Bloomberg She was fired by the head of Google’s AI division in response to an internal email talking about how the company treats minority workers, particularly those who identify as black and female.
NBC News notes that Google has not yet commented on these allegations.