1. Google, from what i can tell, is okay with it being it's problem as long as it can meet its hiring goals.
2. You have pretty much no data to base this on. Seriously.
Unless Google has made their internal hiring notes and private information public, there's no data to be found on that. I don't know why you'd expect an opinion like that to have data to it when the opposite does not have data to it, either.
Also, be careful, logic as in item #1 is the same logic that companies use to justify any form of discrimination.
This is unfortunate, because hiring is one of the areas where a responsive, streamlined approach is most critical to acceptable outcomes. Creating a committee of irrelevant appointees to come in at a late stage and give an indirect evaluation based on the notes from two prior interviews only creates an opportunity to block good people w/ bikeshedding.
If someone whose company is getting acquired can't even get fast tracked out of this demeaning and silly process, it's no wonder Google turns off non-luminaries more interested in getting good stuff done than dealing with red tape and bureaucracies.
In modern academia, there are hundreds of aspirants for each tenure-track job. To both get a job and then get tenure means you've been peer-reviewed as excellent dozens of times over since finishing school.
>After all the whole point of tenure is to protect people from getting fired regardless of how bad their peer-judged performance is.
No, the point of tenure is to protect people from getting fired when they have controversial political opinions like, "Stop gutting state university funding".
If you don't want to hire a tenured stats professor with 10+ years research experience to work in data science, I think that's your problem. Maybe OP's wife had some horrifying deal-breaker personality trait, but really it just sounds like Google's committee was too snobby about Industry Versus Academia to hire an experienced statistics expert to do statistics.