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Notes -
HR screens initial candidates who are then put in front of the relevant teams.
Even if HR does initial screens, they aren't throwing the resumes of qualified applicants in the circular file just because they're (probably) white. Most of it is throwing out the massive volume of garbage applications from people who have no hope of getting the job in any universe. Usually they don't even do a great job at this, especially if this work is outsourced to a recruiting company. My brother had a manager who was completely incompetent but only ended up getting fired after it was discovered that he was sharing personal information of female employees with people who didn't need to know about it. A friend of ours (who used to work with my brother) works for a company that was looking to hire a manager and the hiring team was complaining that all their staffing company was doing was sending them this loser's application over and over again.
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Replying to @falling-star too
Well, I can say that's not the way it works in my company, which may not be quite the norm. In my company, individual teams drive the hiring process, including finding candidates. Recruitment does a call, but it's mostly to prep candidates in what comes next. If they narrowed out a candidate during an intense hiring period for reasons other then serious flags, there would be hell to pay. Managers have a difficult enough time getting candidates through the hiring pipeline as is.
If individual teams already have full discretion over hiring then presumably abolishing DEI will have minimal impact anyway (it will either continue to happen if individual managers put their fingers on the scale for ideological reasons, or it won’t if they don’t).
HR is involved and will push managers and hiring decisionmakers towards diversity candidates, but they're not, at least in tech, a literal screen. Orders like Trump's will remove some of HR's ability to push; they can no longer say DEI will be better for getting government contracts, for instance.
What I’ve seen is two-fold: (1) if we are hiring a larger class, then there are effectively AA slots and (2) people understand incentives and so if there is a URM they will push them through the interview process provided they are reasonably in the same church (if not pew) as the other candidate.
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Clueless recruiters have often blocked people I've referred to my company so that they don't even get a phone screen. In most cases it's because the recruiters are incompetent and can't understand a resume, but there may be some DEI thumb on the scale here as well.
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Yes, that's my assessment based on my company. It's a big company, but I know that at least one other big company totally differs from mine in how hiring is done (it's more central, less team-owned). I don't know which is closer to the norm for others companies.
Despite all of my company's flaws, I've always been proud of the fact that I really don't know any diversity hires. The team owned and data driven process to assess candidate skills have been very effective at keeping DEI's influence on hiring almost non-existent.
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