Outreach programs typically don't influence the hiring decision. But they influence the stream of people that will try to get an internship at your company.
For instance, if you're a Stanford grad and keep strong ties with the alma mater, teachers there may say a word about you to their promising students, and you'll end up with more people from Stanford than from e.g. Yale. A DEI program could look to fix that by advertising your company to other venues.
> expanding that candidate stream has a very real cost for the business
I don't dispute that, but we've moved from "it would lead to worse hires" to "it would cost money to the company". If the company is willing to put $0 into the issue, business as usual is the only viable solution.
I will concede that if you do this very rigorously (reject out-of-quota candidates very early in the hiring pipeline, without letting current quota deviation ever influence any specific hiring decision) it is possible to not affect candidate quality.
But I think in practice (also from personal experience) it is very hard to make a business stick to this.
I also think that this mostly amounts to investing additional ressources into expanding the candidate stream (=> outreach programs), hiding a bunch of the costs (those outreach programs could have gotten you twice the benefit without the quota-rejection) for extremely questionable gain; consider: You could've probably gotten the same result from a DEI perspective by just paying female candidates the cost of those outreach programs (that would be a strictly better outcome for them, but a shit framework from an ethical POV).
In summary: I think it's always an excellent idea to remove racial/gender bias in hiring (=> create non-hostile environment, accomodate needs where possible, get rid of condescending, sexist pricks in HR), but I think it is misguided, pointless and wasteful to try and balance the outcomes at the very end...
For instance, if you're a Stanford grad and keep strong ties with the alma mater, teachers there may say a word about you to their promising students, and you'll end up with more people from Stanford than from e.g. Yale. A DEI program could look to fix that by advertising your company to other venues.
> expanding that candidate stream has a very real cost for the business
I don't dispute that, but we've moved from "it would lead to worse hires" to "it would cost money to the company". If the company is willing to put $0 into the issue, business as usual is the only viable solution.