Yes. This has all kinds of alarm bells going off.
I don't care who you are or what you look like. I don't care how old you are, your gender, sexual preferences, citizenship status, and so forth. I'm certain that having a large mix of these will make my work environment more productive and interesting, but for each candidate I have much more important things to think about.
The job is to make technology do stuff for people. This means you must have technology skills and people skills. Folks can argue about the ratio, but as a first approximation, for the vast majority of commercial software development work, it's about 10 percent tech and 90 percent people skills. We aren't building the next Google. We're going down the hall to talk to the CSRs about why the IVR system is acting up.
I have interviewed devs. I found them almost universally atrocious both in tech and people skills. I found no correlation between certifications and actual ability to perform (except a positive correlation between advanced degrees and feelings of self-entitlement.)
Do whatever tech tests you want, and for sure capture a ton of metrics. But the only process that has made any sense to me over the years is the team audition process. It's a play. We have try-outs. For a few folks we pick some candidates and backups. Everybody shows up for a sprint or two and the rest of the team sees how it works out.
I don't see that universe as being anything close to the universe the government allegation seems to assume, where ratios of one category of candidate should translate into the same ratios of successful applicants.