“We’d love to hire more diverse candidates. We just can’t find them.”
The pipeline problem is the most popular excuse in corporate hiring. It puts the blame on the supply of candidates rather than the design of the system that filters them.
If your pipeline only produces one kind of person, you don’t have a pipeline problem. You have a filter problem. The pipeline is fine. Your intake is broken.
But “we have a filter problem” means someone has to change something. “We have a pipeline problem” means nobody has to change anything. The problem is out there. Somewhere. In the pipeline. Not here. Not us.