> Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination.

Exactly. That's what the parent comment is saying. But they are thinking about the entire funnel, not just the end of it. By the time a slate of candidates reaches a company's hiring process, there has already been an immense selection bias against minority candidates.

Two people growing up in different places (not different cities, but different neighborhoods within the same city) have lived in completely different worlds. Their schools are different; their health care is different; their safety is different; their opportunities are different; the people they know are different. And much of the time there's a stark racial difference in the makeup of those places. Historically this was very much intentional; but even if it were no longer intentional, the effects won't dissipate for a long time.

So when you get a slate of candidates that all happen to be white, it's not just a random coincidence. Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That would seem kind of odd, right?

Now obviously the best thing would be to fix all the other environmental factors that led to an all-white candidate slate. But that's not going to happen any time soon. So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel to elevate candidates that just barely miss out. In other words, candidates that are strong, but, say, don't know anyone that works at microsoft (no surprise there... two worlds) or perhaps don't think they're good enough.

The article points to a rising black employee population has some kind of evidence of injustice, but, if the company works harder to find qualified black candidates then obviously the percentage would rise. Unless we think that skin-color is a predictor of performance (ugh, I hope no one actually does) then improving a hiring process would result in an employee population that more closely matches the demographics of the population at large.

It's essentially impossible to have a job opening without making choices that will directly affect which people see that job opening. If you go to some university's job fair, you're selecting for the students at that university. If you had chosen to go to a different university's job fair instead, the students who were exposed to your job posting would likely have different qualities. There is no "default behavior that doesn't constitute making a choice," thus the only thing we can debate is the virtues of which particular choice was made, not whether a choice was made.

None of this engages with the comment it replies to. One way to see that is to simply remove the quoted sentence, and read the comment to see if it would remain coherent at the top of the thread.