The best thing a company can do is adopt a non-discrimination policy. DEI is not such a policy, in fact, it represents an intentional racist policy designed to achieve a specific outcome. Imagine a hard-working single black mother being told the management job she is working for will be given to a Hispanic man. I saw something close to this in the past happen, because the company had plenty of Asians and African Americans at the company but was underrepresented with respect to Hispanics and Native Americans.
Do we really want to pit minorities against each other. People think DEI is all about replacing white people with minorities in order to meet quotas, but increasingly it is about replacing minorities with other minorities.
My Asian American children were highly resentful of the fact that because Universities have "to many Asians", they get discriminated against. While many universities deny it, the combined board scores and GPA results of admitted students prove that some minorities (much more than "whites") are getting discriminated against while other minorities are benefiting. I put whites in quotation marks because often Persians and Indians who are "white" are discriminated against as much or more than people of European white ethnicity.
Interestingly, DEI often does little to help poor Americans, who regardless of skin color often need a hand due to poor public schools in urban and rural areas and instead most of the benefit of DEI is enjoyed by middle class minorities who are underachieving their peer group.
Am I suggesting that there are not any overachieving African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans (the three groups that most often benefit from DEI policies)... no. Everywhere I worked in my career, it was obvious to everyone which minorities "deserved" their positions based on their talent and which ones the company hired to hit a target.
Now stepping back from the unfairness of using skin color to pick who gets hired whether discriminating in favor of someone of color or against, there is an argument to be made that many jobs have multiple candidates who all meet the criteria of the job and when that is the case, who should a company pick?
My experience working for several national and multi-national public corporations is they tend to favor the minority candidate long before DEI ever existed as a policy.
Most major companies want diversity, equal opportunity, and inclusiveness... why because good companies are based on good people and to attract the best people, you need every qualified candidate regardless of their individual demographic traits to want to work for your company.
If your company comes across as a discriminatory one, whether that is affirmative action, DEI, or racism, you will lose some of the most qualified potential employees who see bigotry in any form as bad.
