What I don't think many people get is that these types of people and structures and institutions they exist in largely exist in order to perpetuate inequality in many ways.
It's not just google though, this is fairly widespread in America, and I bet many of these companies that practice hiring like that are either doing it because thats what everyone else has done (without realizing the reasons or not articulating the real ones), or because taking those kinds of candidates means not only do you get a potentially useful in their job employee, but you get access to another kind of elite-social capital.
People ignore the extent to which the signals they're using as input are simply correlated with the signals some previous gatekeeper used. Therefore, they vastly underestimate how much a person's resume is "all signal".
I'm a great case in point. At some point, scholarships I had earned became the justification for giving me more scholarships. Much of my early adult life was spent compiling signals and statuses. I absolutely tried to develop real capabilities along the way, but to say my "impressive" resume indicated significant real world value created outside my own life probably wasn't true until about age 30.
When I was a hiring manager, I tried to evaluate people on what they accomplished relative to what they were given.
It's not just google though, this is fairly widespread in America, and I bet many of these companies that practice hiring like that are either doing it because thats what everyone else has done (without realizing the reasons or not articulating the real ones), or because taking those kinds of candidates means not only do you get a potentially useful in their job employee, but you get access to another kind of elite-social capital.
https://youtu.be/PMotykw0SIk?t=595