For anyone, finding a job in Silicon Valley can be a mysterious and befuddling process. Google used to routinely conduct 25 interviews over the course of six months before settling on a candidate. They also asked all applicants, no matter their age, for their SAT scores. And the questions they posed to interviewees were strange enough to warrant pop-culture parody. In ‘‘The Internship,’’ Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson’s characters are asked during a Google interview: ‘‘You’re shrunken down to the size of nickels and dropped to the bottom of a blender. What do you do?’’

Google likes to hire people who possess something it calls Googleyness, an amorphous measure of how well they will fit in. It’s not easily defined, but it includes things like enjoying fun and — appropriately — coping well with ambiguity. This emphasis on ‘‘culture fit’’ isn’t unique to Google; it seems to have spread across industries as work hours have lengthened and eaten into our leisure time, and as offices, especially in the valley, have further blurred the distinction between work and leisure. What a candidate might be like in a conference room at 10 a.m. has become almost as important as what he’d be like playing Ping-Pong after a few beers from the office kegerator.

It should come as no surprise that hiring for culture fit can be self-reinforcing. In 2014, Google for the first time released data on the makeup of its employees, revealing the sort of work force its recruitment strategy yields. Only 2 percent of its employees were black, and 3 percent were Latino. Seventy percent were men. And, as at most tech companies, Asian-Americans made up a disproportionately large share of employees. Google has claimed, like many companies across all industries, that the problem is not entirely of its own making, but far upstream: There simply aren’t enough qualified women and minority candidates applying.