The last place where I did any significant interviewing, a fairy large, successful SF Bay Area startup, 100% had a huge blind spot for diversity hiring. What do

The last place where I did any significant interviewing, a fairy large, successful SF Bay Area startup, 100% had a huge blind spot for diversity hiring. What do I mean by that? That I had ample reason to believe that a Black candidate from an HBCU would walk into the interview room with a point penalty. The whole point of interviewing a candidate is to get an unbiased read from them that you can then add to your other impressions of them! If you think the candidate is subpar before they ever open their mouth, you're wasting your own time! To begin with, employees had a common mantra that "it's just a pipeline problem." They had examined themselves, decided that they are pure, logical, and unbiased, and concluded that the dramatic shortfall in Black and Latino hires had to be explained entirely by external factors. Something was wrong, either with society or with the candidates themselves, but it certainly wasn't anything with our interview practices or, god forbid, ourselves. This was the starting position of literally every non-Black employee at the company that I had spoken to about the issue of hiring over my multiple years of working there. "It's obviously a pipeline problem." Everyone, including people who would gladly call themselves open-minded bleeding heart social progressives. Second, our HR was a viper's den of absolutely the most knee-jerk bias and spite imaginable. When making small talk with other employees, HR people would constantly talk trash about candidates and make fun of their academic institutions and accomplishments. Many of the software engineers had a sneering attitude about the competence of people in HR roles, and HR people were on average eager to demonstrate that they had power over candidates. It was a toxic environment, but I doubt that it was an unusual environment. HR people circulate between companies pretty constantly, and I hear very similar impressions from my friends at other startups. Pressures like this translate pretty clearly into an inherent penalty for minority candidates. I obviously don't know what got @RealAbril fired from Google, but I was starting to earn a reputation for calling people out when they reflexively said "we'd love to have more diverse hires... but not at the cost of lowering the bar!" See how much Black talent you manage to identify when you start with the belief that diversity candidates are less talented.