> Stop assuming that people from underrepresented groups are inherently unqualified.
They're not. They are commenting how the criteria for hiring changed to include other attributes not related to skill.
If I hire people based on a mix of skill and how much they like baseball, I am inherently hiring on a different measuring stick. I could end up hiring someone with the most skill out of the hiring pool, but that doesn't matter - I'm not hiring based on skill, I'm hiring on some combination of skill and baseball.
It does not mean that the person who gets hired isn't the most skilled. But it also does not mean that the person who gets hired is the most skilled. I stopped caring about hiring the most skilled the moment I added a largely arbitrary hiring attribute into the requirements, how much they like baseball.
Generally I have a problem with this, but I think it's less of a problem than people make it out to be. Yes, we are not hiring based on skill alone.. but, we never were. We were hiring based on skill, attitude, work ethic, how they work with people, etc. A long laundry list of things we want a candidate to be, and difficult to figure out to boot. So yea, if we stop hiring whites because we've got too many, we may miss out on some skill - but when so many of the hiring requirements are vague, difficult to judge and largely a meta-game itself, we stopped caring about hiring skill long ago. Hell, even skill is difficult to judge.
Plus, eventually it'll even out. Suddenly we'll have to stop hiring minorities because there's too many in X company. Which is ironic heh. In the same way that males in some colleges are becoming a minority. Irony.