At Wells Fargo, a quest to increase diversity leads to fake interviews
Joe Bruno, a former executive in the wealth management division of Wells Fargo, had long been troubled by the way his unit handled certain job interviews.
For many open positions, employees would interview a “diverse” candidate — the bank’s term for a woman or person of color — in keeping with the bank’s years-long informal policy. But Bruno noticed that often, the so-called diverse candidate would be interviewed for a job that had been promised to someone else.
He complained to his bosses. They dismissed his claims. In August, Bruno, 58, was fired. In an interview, he said Wells Fargo retaliated against him for telling his superiors that the “fake interviews” were “inappropriate, morally wrong, ethically wrong.”
Wells Fargo said Bruno was dismissed for retaliating against a fellow employee.
Bruno is one of seven current and former Wells Fargo employees who said they were instructed by their direct bosses or human resources managers in the bank’s wealth management unit to interview “diverse” candidates — even though the decision had been made to give the job to another candidate. Five others said they were aware of the practice, or helped to arrange it.
The interviews, they said, seemed to be more about helping Wells Fargo record its diversity efforts on paper — partly in anticipation of possible regulatory audits — rather than hiring more women or people of color. All but three spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were afraid of losing their jobs at Wells Fargo or their new employers.
In an emailed statement, Raschelle Burton, a Wells Fargo spokesperson, said the bank expected all employees to follow its hiring policies and guidelines, which are communicated across the firm. “To the extent that individual employees are engaging in the behavior as described by The New York Times, we do not tolerate it,” Burton said.
Burton said she was aware that informal directives about hiring diverse candidates had long circulated inside the bank. But those rules were from an earlier era that the bank’s current leaders had nothing to do with, she added.
In a June 2020 memo to employees, Charles W. Scharf, who became CEO of Wells Fargo the
year before, pledged to consider a wider array of candidates for jobs at the bank but added that the bank struggled to find qualified Black candidates. He later apologized for the comment when the memo became public in September.
After Scharf’s directive, Wells Fargo adopted a formal policy in requiring that a diverse slate of candidates would have to be interviewed for all open jobs paying more than $100,000 a year.
That August, Wells Fargo paid nearly $8 million to settle a claim by the Department of Labor that it had discriminated against more than 30,000 Black job applicants for positions in banking, sales and support roles.
Wells Fargo had been trying to increase diversity. In 2013, a group of Black financial advisers at Wells Fargo sued the bank for racial discrimination, saying they were corralled into poor neighborhoods and kept away from opportunities to win new clients and partner with white financial advisers.
The bank settled the case in 2017. Wells Fargo paid nearly $36 million to about 320 members of the class-action lawsuit and pledged to “take actions designed to enhance opportunities for employment, earnings and advancement of AfricanAmerican financial advisers and financial adviser trainees.”
As the lawsuit progressed, Wells Fargo began requiring that at least one woman or person of color needed to be interviewed for each job, Burton said. She added that the policy was not written down and was only for certain senior positions.
Bruno joined Wells Fargo in 2000 and worked his way up to market leader for Wells Fargo Advisors in Jacksonville, Fla. He oversaw 14 branches of the bank’s wealth management operation. He saw himself as a champion of diversity.
Bruno mainly was responsible for filling two categories of jobs — financial advisers and financial consultants, who work alongside advisers. He said he often was told to conduct interviews with Black candidates for the financial consultant positions, which were lower-paying jobs. In most cases, Wells had no intention of hiring those people because he or his superiors already picked someone for the job, Bruno said.
Bruno said he eventually refused to conduct the interviews. “I got a Black person on the other side of the table who has no shot at getting the job,” he told his bosses.
Barry Sommers, CEO of Wells Fargo’s wealth and investment management business, said fake interviews wouldn’t even have been necessary for the financial consultant positions for which Bruno was hiring. Their salaries, Sommers said, fell below the $100,000 threshold that required a diverse slate of candidates to be interviewed per Wells Fargo’s 2020 policy.
“There is absolutely no reason why anyone would conduct a fake interview,” Sommers said. Rather than tracking the identities of interviewees, the bank focused on the results, and “the numbers are getting better,” he said.
Of the nearly 26,000 people the bank hired in 2020, 77% were not white men, Burton said. And last year, 81% of the 30,000 people hired were not white men, she said. She declined to specify how many of those new hires were for jobs above the $100,000 salary threshold.
But six current and former Wells Fargo employees, including Bruno, said fake interviews were conducted for many types of positions. Three current employees said they conducted fake job interviews or knew of them as recently as this year.