Want to improve Diversity ROI? You need to start pre-funnel

Most diversity hiring effort gets poured into sourcing, but the decisions that actually shape outcomes happen earlier: in how roles get defined, how hiring managers get engaged, and how interviewers get trained. Pre-funnel work covers all of that, and skipping it is why so many sourcing-heavy diversity efforts stall.

Key ideas covered include:

• Replacing "ideal candidate profile" language with multiple success profiles, so hiring managers stop describing a mythical perfect match and start considering people with different backgrounds, schools, and career paths.
• Using labor market data, from vendor tools or public reports from large tech employers, to set realistic diversity targets rather than aspirational ones that ignore actual talent supply.
• Applying an eighty-twenty rule to required skills: if a candidate has most of what a role needs, the rest is trainable, especially given how often engineers pick up entirely new technologies.
• Weighting adjacent skills and soft skills like adaptability and curiosity as heavily as technical must-haves, since rigid technical requirements are often the biggest aperture-narrowers.
• Starting diversity conversations with hiring managers, especially middle managers who drive volume hiring, well before a requisition opens rather than folding it into a thirty-minute intake meeting.
• Recognizing that new practices like interview slate requirements may slow time-to-fill briefly, but that the delay fades once teams build the muscle.
• Training interviewers on culture add instead of culture fit, inclusion as an evaluated competency for leaders, and the specific dangers of confirmation bias and similarity bias.
• Building hiring principles that state clearly what tradeoffs are acceptable, such as prioritizing values and behaviors over a narrower technical background.
• Adopting a "see something, say something" norm so anyone in the interview process, not just the hiring manager, can challenge vague or biased feedback in debriefs.
• Placing a diversity champion in interview loops, focused specifically on assessing a candidate's ability to learn quickly, so that debrief conversations have someone ready to counter objections about missing years of experience with evidence about trainability.

The combined argument: talent is distributed evenly, access is not, and recruiters who move upstream of the requisition have far more leverage over diversity outcomes than those working sourcing alone.