"Second (and I kind of hate to give this one away), I ask 'what do you sacrifice when recruiting to ensure diversity?'"
I find it disturbing that you think hiring diversity entails a sacrifice.
I find it disturbing that you think hiring diversity entails a sacrifice.
Of course it's a sacrifice. Under-represented groups are under-represented in standard recruiting channels. That's tautological. If you want a set of recruiting channels that represents all available talent, you can't use the standard set of channels. You need to go catalog all of the available sources of talent, including obscure sources. That takes effort. That's a sacrifice.
In addition, under-represented strengths don't show up in standard assessment techniques. Again, that's tautological. Standard assessment only measures over-repesented strengths. If you want to measure under-represented strengths then you need to use custom assessment techniques which, again, takes additional effort, which is a sacrifice.
These conclusions just fall naturally from the word "under-represented" and a presumption that there is room for improvement in recruiting channels and assessment. If there is no such room, the additional effort will fail to change the hiring demographics. Which will be evidence that your recruiting channels are representative and your assessments accurate, and you can ease up on recruiting pipeline optimization.
What's disturbing to you about any of this?
Also, I want to know that they are willing to tell people who only accept universally-applied, context-blind systems to take a hike. It is impossible to fix a cultural problem of disparate experiences with anything pretending to "objectivity".