Clashes Over Ethics At Major Tech Companies Are Causing Problems For Recruiters
Already dealing with backlash from employees who object to working with government agencies, major tech companies are now facing criticism from a new source â prospective hires.

When Matt Meshulam, a Chicago-based software engineer, received a cold recruiting email from Amazon, he already knew he wouldnât be taking the interview.
âI had been reading a lot in the last month or so about their providing tech to Palantir, and their warehouse labor practices, and their potential large contract with the Department of Defense,â Meshulam told BuzzFeed News.
In his email to the recruiter, which he later tweeted, Meshulam wrote, âI am not willing to consider opportunities with Amazon as long as it sells facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies, and enables ICEâs separation of immigrant families by providing technology to Palantir.â
Meshulamâs refusal to consider working for Amazon until the company addresses ethical concerns that employees and outside watchdogs have raised is part of a larger trend. Using the hashtag #TechWontBuildIt, a handful of tech workers on Twitter have shared how theyâre rejecting interviews with companies like Amazon and Salesforce, either because they disagree with the companyâs practices or donât want to help build its products.
Facebook Recruiter: We love your experience come work for us. Me: No thank you. I love my current job and my privacy & data security principles don't align with that of FBs. Recruiter: That's OK! We love diverse opinions. Me: I'd rather not be the lone voice telling you to stop.
Inaugural #TechWontBuildIt reply:
I got cold-called by a recruiter for Salesforce. I wrote this back. #TechWontBuildIt
Trained programmers, software engineers, and data scientists are in notoriously high demand in the tech industry. Companies spend millions of dollars on recruiting efforts every year and offer a dizzying array of perks and benefits (lengthy parental leave, infertility treatment, free beer, unlimited vacation) to entice workers. That means prospective employees have leverage â and some of them are trying to use it to get these companies to change their ways. The actions of a handful of individuals are unlikely to steer corporate policy, but the trend could signal a looming recruiting pipeline problem if the companies donât change tack.
âLiterally, they get a job offer twice a week,â said San Francisco State University professor John Sullivan of the demand for qualified tech workers. As a result, whether its diversity or sustainability, âwhatever people care about, you have to care about it too.â
âRecruiters donât really track it, so they donât have a data sheet saying, âWeâre losing people because of this,ââ said Sullivan, who is also a recruiting adviser to companies, including Google and Facebook. âThey havenât made the connection, but itâs certainly real.â
Employees opposed to a companyâs practices are âgoing to answer a call from a recruiter that says, âThis company is doing cool stuff, and theyâre not working with ICE.ââ
Meshulam also said heâs observing a shift in the tech industry. âA lot of people are waking up a little bit more now, and realizing we donât really have much of a say in what weâre building, we donât have much of a say in what our workplace looks like,â he said. âAnd people are starting to realize â thereâs underutilized negotiating power.â
Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Amazon wrote via email, âOver the past three years, Amazon has had millions of job applicants and grown by more than 300k employees. We welcome a variety of views on a wide range of topics, and weâre pleased to see independent data that shows Amazon is a sought after and great place to work.â
Salesforce declined to comment on this story.
There has been something of a tech employee awakening of late: Thousands of workers at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce have signed petitions asking management to cancel contracts with government agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Department of Defense. In June, Google employees succeeded in getting the company to agree not to renew its deal to help the Pentagon build AI tools for drone warfare. Communicating with recruiters is one way for tech workers to wield influence even if the companies arenât currently employing them.
Thatâs why Will, a software engineer in the Midwest who asked only to be referred to by his first name, said he knew he couldnât accept an interview with Amazon after the company sent him a recruiting email, even though heâs actively looking to move to the West Coast. âIf it was a different company that wasnât so morally tainted, I probably would have considered it,â he told BuzzFeed News.
Instead, Will wrote a quick reply. âWhile Iâm sure this would be a great opportunity, I have no interest in working for a company that so eagerly provides the infrastructure that ICE relies on to keep human beings in cages, that sells facial recognition technology to police, and that treats its warehouse workers as less than human,â he wrote.
Willâs message was written on impulse, and he didnât realize other people had done the same thing until the saw their tweets. That realization made him feel empowered. âThe fact that someone else independently had the same idea sort of implies there are probably a lot more people doing the same thing,â he said. âIf thereâs a significant amount, I feel like the recruiters are going to have to say something at some point, or that theyâre at least more likely to report it to higher ups.â
The recruiter at Amazon never responded to Willâs message, but other tech workers who sent similar interview declines did receive answers. Meshulam, the engineer from Chicago, said the recruiter he was in contact with thanked him for his candor and said heâd get back in touch if the employee petition made any headway.
Dropbox engineer Anna Geiduschek, whose tweet about her rejection of an Amazon recruiter inspired Meshulam, was surprised by the answer she received.
Decided to respond to a recruiting email for a change today #TechWontBuildIt #NoTechForICE
âWow I honestly had no idea,â the recruiter that contacted her wrote in a response. âI will run this up to leadership. Usually they are really proactive about these kinds of things.â
For Geiduschek, the recruiting email from Amazon felt like a powerful âpersonal leverage point,â an opportunity to share her disapproval of what Amazon is doing in a way that might actually get people to listen.
âIf itâs just me, itâs not going to change,â she said. âBut if a tenth of the workforce was threatening to quit, or they felt like 10% of their recruiting pipeline was turning away when they would have otherwise taken a job, then I think it really would become on a lot of executivesâ radars.â
The likelihood is fairly low that tech executives would be seriously concerned over a handful of engineers turning down job opportunities, says Will Hunsinger, CEO of Riviera Partners, a tech recruiting firm with offices in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. âFor every engineer or executive that takes a moral or ethical stand, thereâs 99 on the individual contributor side and nine on the executive side who are ... going to engage with the company if thatâs where they want to work,â he said.
âIf you talk to college students and say, âDo you want to work for this company?â they say, âNo way, not ever, itâs a deal breaker.ââ
What companies should worry about, Hunsinger said, is retaining the employees they already have. âIf [employees] believe that the company ... is doing things that are an antithesis to what they decided that they wanted to pursue as a professional career ⌠theyâre the ones who are going to answer a call from a recruiter that says, âThis company is doing cool stuff, and theyâre not working with ICE.ââ
But Sullivan, the SFSU professor, said in the last two years, heâs increasingly hearing from students who say theyâd flat-out refuse to work for tech companies, especially Amazon. (âYou get the warehouse stories number one ... and facial recognition for some reason is huge,â he said.)
âIf you talk to college students and say, âDo you want to work for this company?â they say, âNo way, not ever, itâs a deal breaker.â But then you talk to recruiters, and I donât hear them say, âWe have to change our way of managing because itâs affecting our ability to recruit,ââ Sullivan said.
Sullivan estimates that Uberâs public meltdown over sexual harassment and discrimination cost the company around $100 million in recruiting because of talent that went elsewhere. While in the short term companies might choose lucrative government contracts despite losing a few new recruits, in the long term, the real cost will become apparent, he said.
âAt some point six months or a year from now, [HR is] going to get a yell from executives saying, âThereâs a connection, we need to stop doing business this way or sell it better, because people have too many choices,ââ he said. âExecutives think business is business. Thatâs certainly Googleâs response â âWe make a lot of money out of this!â Facial recognition at Amazon, theyâre like, âThis could be the future!â Executives donât want to stop it, and they donât know how to handle the fact that employees say, âNo, I wonât stand it.ââ
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Caroline O'Donovan is a senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.
Contact Caroline O'Donovan at caroline.odonovan@buzzfeed.com.
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