At a previous consulting company that I left about 2 decades back I used to be in the hiring pipeline. I was the techical manager on a project and I got the candidates after they had been vetted by HR and by my supervisor who handled the administrative parts of the management process. I was the last step in the chain, "Review these 5 people and tell me which one fits best.", were my basic marching orders.

I experienced that same "filtering" described above I was only getting male white twenty-somethings. After kicking around some I found that they were NOT being filtered by our local HR rep who was both female and non-caucasian, she had noticed a similar thing. She wondered allowed to me if those were the only people applying for the job. When we went through two cycles of people who were not technically suitable she asked corporate HR to send her "raw resumes" and let her do the priimary sort on them. We got a whole host of people with varied backgrounds.

It seems that the people who had the primary legal responsibility to KNOW BETTER were the one's doing the filtering. We got a very unofficial response that they were under orders to minimize insurance costs by filtering out older people and women. Don't ask me why color should have entered into it? That may have been some individual or individuals personal animus? Maybe once given the onus to apply one blatantly illegal filter they felt justified in applying others?

Regardless once my local HR rep started doing the primary filtering we got our best three employees in the whole history of the hiring on that project. Top scores on all of the critical aspects, their technical skills were top notch, the worked hard at doing the little things in development that make projects more maintainable, like documentation, and they were all great teamates too.

For the record they were two women and one non-white male. But they were hired for their skills on the strength of their CVs and their interviews. All three had considerable development experience so they were a little older not just fresh out of college. Had the good fortune to work with one of them again on a completely different project for a different firm. I would gladly have worked with or FOR any of them again.