Why do you suppose that a non-broken recruiting pipeline would result in more diverse candidates? Do you really think all candidate pools in all professions, and in all locations, are as diverse as the population at all times?

I think this really varies for each position, but most SWE positions really don't require special skills beyond a CS degree from a 4-year program. Sure, there may be special industry knowledge that you need to know but I'm not talking about languages, frameworks, databases, etc... if you studied CS, I expect you to have the capacity to learn this shit. You can learn the problem domain in well enough in 6 months and rely on your PMs and boss to fill in the details.

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...

> Do you really think all candidate pools in all professions, and in all locations, are as diverse as the population at all times?

No but I think you should be able to find a single minority candidate over the course of months.

Why do you think so? I have a hard enough time finding a qualified candidate of any variety.

At our school, 100% of teachers are women. One Hundred Percent. 97% of administrative staff is also women. In all of hair saloons in my area, 100% of staff is women. All of the nurses in our nearby hospital are women. They don't care about diversity and I do not think it is due to bias. I think they simply don't have enough men applying in their pipeline for these jobs. None of their CEOs have insisted in enforcing population statistics on to their employee statistics.

My friend works at PayP[redacted] and as a white female, _she_ was the minority hire. Somehow, in the SF Bay Area, almost all of their recruits that get to interview are [country of origin redacted]. It sounds like blatant discrimination, BUT if no one's complaining, is there an issue?

> BUT if no one's complaining, is there an issue?

Maybe no-one dares to complain, because it is easily perceived as racism.

The author says he is in AI, and when I was hiring entry level ML engineers I had similar challenges. As much as we blame the recruiting pipeline, I think it is the educational pipeline that is not creating a sufficiently diverse talent pool. Part of it is "weed out" courses that adversely affect students from less privileged backgrounds[1]. An additional (perhaps controversial) opinion I have is that companies are so aggressive about their individual diversity goals that they often pluck students out of the training pipelines prematurely (e.g. courting Ph.D. students before they finish their dissertation).

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/...

I am ignorant when it comes to where companies look when they are hiring, but your comment makes it seem like companies can choose sources that are somehow segregated by race/gender/etc. What/where are these sources? Do you really think microsoft has any trouble finding people who want to work there? Where else should they look? In all my time being a straight white male, I've never listed my resume on a "whites only" job site.

I'm surprised they didn't do c) which was to interview an obviously unqualified candidate to get the checkoff on the policy. This is the usual workaround.

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.

The pipeline is clogged for everyone. Lack of diversity is an industry-wide issue which needs to be addressed throughout the industry and beyond, not a problem with recruiting at any single company.

> "they should fix their broken recruiting pipeline"

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.

That's part of the problem. The other part is the networks you are tapping into to find candidates. People tend to collect others that look, act, and think like them. That's one reason why people group up into subgroups that all have similar traits, past experiences, and belief systems.

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.

But here you have a multi-national corporation, with offices globally and ability to hire from any culture on the planet - and despite waiting months, actively searching for a "diverse" candidate, they were unable to find a single candidate who was "diverse" enough.

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.

> months, actively searching for a "diverse" candidate

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 think that if he had to do the LinkedIn searches himself, you can conclude that his recruiters weren’t all that great. I’d be annoyed at them in his shoes.

Oh, whatever. Blame it on the recruiters.

I guess we're just looking for any excuse now to NOT talk about the actual source of the problem.

Let me guess, you don't work in recruiting nor in a role where you actually have to try to find good candidates? Because you are way off the mark on how these things work.

You guess wrong! I'm a hiring manager, and I'm very good at it. In the last few years I've had multiple quarters in which I successfully hired at a rate of 1 engineer a month or higher.

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.

What conclusions do I draw from this? Sorry to be so blunt, but my conclusion is that you are lacking a lot of understanding of how these things work. Are you really arguing that they can fly and move anyone in from any country as a means to deal with struggles in diverse hiring? Do you not know much about much that costs and the issues with visa involved?

> You yourself say "they tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one". Why do you think that is?

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.

Every single comment in this thread is a deflection. "It's the recruiters", "the manager sucks", "subconscious bias", "the position is too specialized", etc. Why is that?

A deflection from what? A predetermined conclusion?

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.

> It's telling that this person['s]... take away wasn't that they should fix [Microsoft's] broken recruiting pipeline but that the corporate policy was what was wrong.

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.

I work at a crypto/fintech startup. There aren't many women in tech, in finance or in crypto. Even fewer in all three. It took us months to find a woman to hire when our HR insisted we do so before hiring anyone else.

Why do you say the recruiting pipeline is broken? What would you suggest as a fix?

And what does "it's telling" mean? What do you think this tells us about the author?