If you are truly in a domain where you cannot hire CS graduates, then D&I is going to put a lot of burden on your recruitment team to find candidates to meet slating requirements. But you probably aren't...
No but I think you should be able to find a single minority candidate over the course of months.
This is trying to treat the symptoms, not the disease. You yourself say "they tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one". Why do you think that is?
Whatever you're trying to solve - the "issue" starts decades earlier, at home. It's about how people are brought up, their access to education, their social environment. Culture actually plays a role, too.
When it comes to a recruiting pipeline this is critical. If you are tapping members of your team to help finding candidates from their networks and your team lacks diversity, you are going to just build out your team with more of the same.
The same goes for where you are looking for candidates outside of your team. If you are only targeting a small number of schools it's really easy to end up with a homogenized set to pull from. I know from experience working at some of the big tech powerhouses, they'd target a handful of schools and only hire college grads from there - which means they miss out on recruiting from state schools, historically black colleges, and other pockets where things are more diverse.
What conclusions do you draw from this? That "people are racist"? That the pipeline is broken? This feels like ignoring the elephant in the room.
I think it explicitly said they did not do that:
> I spent months waiting for a single person to apply who fulfilled the racial requirement. When no one did, I spent hours trying to find people on LinkedIn who I thought might count as black or Hispanic based on their name or resume.
It seems like a good next step would be to give the author more tools to find more diverse candidates, rather than having them come up with trying to gauge ethnicity by name on LinkedIn and getting those to apply.
I guess we're just looking for any excuse now to NOT talk about the actual source of the problem.
One of the first things I do when I get a new job is reach out to whoever I partner with on recruiting and spend significant time working with them to make sure they understand what I'm looking for and how to do initial screens if that's the recruiter's role in this company. I talk about diversity and how I approach it. For the first month or so at least, I ask the recruiter to show me as many resumes as possible and I give a paragraph or two of feedback on each one so they know what I did or didn't like about them.
I also expect that I'll be doing a fair amount of time searching LinkedIn myself, particularly at the beginning of the process, for the same reasons I give the recruiter solid feedback on resumes -- it helps them understand what I want out of my candidates. I also tend to pull in my team for sourcing sessions, because there's always someone on the team who knows a perfect candidate but didn't think to refer them.
If the company isn't paying me for a LinkedIn professional account with unlimited searches, I'm not gonna pay for it myself, mind you. In that case the amount of searching I can do is limited, but that's life.
Let's review what the original author said:
> I spent months waiting for a single person to apply who fulfilled the racial requirement. When no one did, I spent hours trying to find people on LinkedIn who I thought might count as black or Hispanic based on their name or resume.
"I spent months waiting." That's awfully passive, but I've had bad recruiters in the past, so I get the possibility. However, as I said, I would be annoyed if my company had a goal -- regardless of what it was -- and the recruiters weren't actually doing anything to help me reach it.
I'll chime in here that if a person works at Microsoft and has the resources of Microsoft recruiting on their side, that they are in a better position than most to end up with a wide choice of applicants. Microsoft can sponsor visas if need be, and their compensation is generally high enough to merit consideration of relocation, if necessary. (Worth noting here that a non-diverse slate of applicants is in many cases a process smell that your pipeline sucks.)
We also don't know for what role(s) the author was hiring. While the assumption here seems to be that they were having trouble finding a diverse slate of applicants for "Senior AI Researcher, PhD and 20+ years experience required," for all we know they are whining that they couldn't get applicants to be CRUD programmers building out APIs, or PMs, or doc writers, or any of the other myriad roles that go into shipping software. Given that, we don't really know where to place blame. Could be that this manager just sucks at their job.
When I'm troubleshooting a bug, the first thing I do is to enumerate the possible ways in which the bug might occur, then devise tests to rule out most of those possibilities. This doesn't seem to be any different.
Why is it telling? He's managing a team, and the policy is the more immediate and fixable obstacle to him solving his business hiring problem. Even if Microsoft was capable of "fixing" it's recruiting pipeline, that could never realistically happen in time for him to fill that role.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/...
Maybe no-one dares to complain, because it is easily perceived as racism.
There is no broken recruiting pipeline. There are simply not enough candidates in the pool to staff every company in a way that is representative.
And what does "it's telling" mean? What do you think this tells us about the author?