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So is that "discrimination?"Yes, absolutely. It may be passive and unconscious, but it's still discrimination. I bet a lot of more-than-qualified candidates -- many likely even more qualified than the people who ended up getting hired -- were rejected.
Unless you're going to assert that Indian people are uniquely the most qualified and best at building advertising systems (which I hope we can agree would be an absurd assertion to make), it's a near certainty that better candidates were passed over.
And looking at it from the potential candidate perspective, I personally wouldn't want to work on a team that is heavily over-represented by any one race (even my own), and I wouldn't be surprised if that "scared away" some great candidates (of other races) for positions as well. This is no different than the archetypal example of a woman engineer being uncomfortable joining a team full of men.
> People tend to refer their friends and give good recommendations to people they know.
I've come to believe that referrals are great when you're a tiny startup trying to find people whose work you can trust (since dead weight can be fatal to a new company), but become less and less useful -- and sometimes even counterproductive -- as a company grows in size.
At any rate, at any non-tiny company, any referral should be put through the same interview process as the other candidates, and should be judged based on the interview, not on the referrer's opinion. The referrer should not even be a part of the interview process, anyway. Not just when it comes to their referral, but (if possible), they shouldn't be a part of the other candidates' interview panels either, as they may be (at best) unconsciously biased against the others.
> A Canadian is more likely to know other Canadians.
Canadians aren't a racial group (and a Canadian may be white, black, native, Asian, Indian, whatever), so I don't think this particular example has anything to do with the rest of what you're talking about. If that team mostly or exclusively comprised white Canadians (or Canadians of any other single race), then yeah, maybe there's an issue there. And regardless, a team comprised of the same $X -- where $X is pretty much anything -- should be a red flag. To me, that's a sign that the team may be cliquish and discriminate (even unconsciously) against anyone who might join the team but be an "outsider" from the perspective of $X.