Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies have been falling on hard times since even before Donald Trump’s inauguration. How can talent leaders respond in the face of evidence they were working?
Article summary:
DEI has fallen on hard times but, for every organization rolling back on DEI, there’s another standing up to defend their diversity efforts.
The yin and yang:
- Trump has halted DEI programs across federal agencies and revoked the decades-old EO that gave teeth to affirmative action, putting DEI on the ropes. Organizations are scaling back, ending, or rebranded their schemes to adjust to the new politics.
- While there’s a pivot away from promoting DEI initiatives, it’s not as dead as the media has been reporting, cautions Gerry Crispin, co-founder of CareerXroads.
Where we’re at now:
- “Countless studies that show a diverse workforce is more profitable,” says Chris Hoyt, President and co-founder of CareerXroads. JPMorganChase has the data to prove their diversity initiatives are making shareholders money – why would an organization stop something that works?
- The DEI agenda is bound up with the employer brand, culture, and talent engagement. Employers don’t want to step down on fairness in hiring, and neither do candidates. Reality will collide with rhetoric.
Where we go next:
- Many companies will remain steadfast in their commitment to promote fair and ethical hiring, as both a moral imperative and a business advantage, whether those programs fall under the DEI banner or not.
- Data is key to defending the success of DEI programs and a tool to “collectively influence some of our laggards to step up and become more counted in terms of where we want to go [as a profession],” Crispin says.
- Highlighting the cultural values you’re proud of within the organization will keep the talent pool engaged and help manage candidate perceptions during the current tension surrounding DEI.
In January, President Trump signed a series of Executive Orders that left little room for nuance: diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training programs were to be halted across all federal agencies, and the decades-old Executive Order 11246 (Equal Employment Opportunity) was revoked.
EO 11246 was signed by President Johnson in 1965. It instructed federal contractors to affirmatively prevent employment discrimination based on the protected categories of race, sex, and so on. Trump’s new EO does not eliminate those protected categories, but it does mandate the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) to stop promoting “diversity” or “workforce balancing” based on them.
This move by Trump was not exactly unexpected. Following the Supreme Court’s 2023 take down of affirmative action in college admissions, a long list of organizations — including Facebook, McDonald’s, Lowe’s, John Deere, and Target — have scaled back, ended, or rebranded their DEI schemes to adjust to the new politics. Trump’s EO is just the outermost layer of a snowball that keeps getting bigger as it rolls down the hill.
“Unfortunately, it has now reached a point where talent acquisition leaders are not able to turn away from the conversation and think, ‘it’s going to be fine’”, says Chris Hoyt, President of CareerXroads. Hoyt and his CareerXroads co-founder, Gerry Crispin, recently chatted with Job Sync about Enterprise Hiring Trends in 2025 — chief among them, DEI.
Watch the full roundtable chat, ‘Everything But AI: What’s In Store for Enterprise Hiring in 2025.’
What’s the lie of the land?
The headlines don’t always provide the full picture. While there’s a clear directional shift away from promoting DEI initiatives, “the media have simply stated that affirmative action is dead, period, and that’s just not true,” Crispin cautions.
Contrary to misleading headlines, the Supreme Court did not make affirmative action in college admissions illegal. It essentially declared that colleges could put their finger on the weight in admission to represent either the marketplace or the population. “If 18% of the population is black and your freshman class is 18%, give or take, that’s fine,” he says. “And if it’s not, you can make an affirmative effort to move it in that direction. But you can’t go beyond that, because now you’re encroaching on other underrepresented groups.”
It’s a watering down of affirmative action in one specific arena, but hardly a mandate to walk away from DEI altogether.
Trump’s recent Executive Order goes further. It specifically eliminates LBJ’s EO 11246 which Crispin calls “the first effort for teeth” in affirmative action. “In the 1950s and ’60s, the data showed that we were not hiring people who did not look like us. EO 11246 basically said, the path forward is to affirmatively make an effort to ensure the pool of talent you’re drawing from includes qualified people from underrepresented groups. Not unqualified – qualified people from underrepresented groups…Me and others in our profession take pride in hiring qualified people, regardless of who they are. If Trump’s Executive Order is held up, it will dismantle all of the consequences for not doing the right thing.”
The “if” in that sentence is key. Commentators are already putting forth arguments that January’s slew of Executive Orders are simply unlawful. “There are lots of things that have to be torn into. Even though we’re seeing companies like Amazon pulling DEI out of their playbooks, it does not mean that’s the lay of the land,” Hoyt says.
Did the data change?
For every organization rolling back on DEI, there’s another standing up to defend its diversity efforts. Costco is one of the latest to put their flag in the ground. The company’s board of directors unanimously dismissed a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank, to investigate the reputational and financial risks associated with the company’s DEI initiatives. “It will be fascinating to see what organizations rally by DEI, either out loud or quietly, because it takes a giant to stand up,” Hoyt says.
For our experts, the biggest talking point is how talent organizations could walk away from their DEI programs in the face of evidence that they are working. The most recent McKinsey Diversity Matters report (Diversity Matters Even More, December 2023), found that companies with high ethnic and gender diversity showed an average 27% financial advantage over firms with low diversity.
“Countless studies that show a diverse workforce is more profitable. Are we ignoring this?” Hoyt questions. He explains how Jamie Dimons, CEO of JPMorganChase, has been very vocal about how the firm’s diversity initiatives are making shareholders money – and he has the data to prove it. Why would an organization stop something that works?
“That’s what we need to highlight,” Crispin says. “We need to put as much light on the companies that are doubling down as we do on the ones that are backing off; the ones that are fully able to use the data they have, like Jamie Dimons, to defend themselves.” Data, he says, is the backbone of any defense of a company’s diversity initiatives, and a tool to “collectively influence some of our laggards to step up and become more counted in terms of where we want to go [as a profession].”
How do you communicate all this to candidates?
For talent acquisition teams on the ground, the most immediate impact of these political shifts will be managing candidates’ perceptions of the recruiting process. The DEI agenda has long been bound up with the employer brand, culture, and talent engagement. It seems unlikely that candidates will want organizations to step down on fairness in hiring, or that DEI walk-back messaging will attract an optimal share of the talent pool. Reality will collide with rhetoric, and recruiters will be the first to field questions.
How do you manage the current tension?
“As a recruiter, and someone who’s talking to candidates, I think the best thing you can do is highlight the cultural values that you’re proud of within the organization. Why are you working there? And if you find yourself in a position where you aren’t aligned with that organization’s direction or their stance, it’s probably time to evaluate why you’re trying to bring more people into that organization,” Hoyt says.
Ultimately, our experts predict that many companies will remain steadfast in their commitment to promote fair and ethical hiring, as both a moral imperative and a business advantage, whether those programs fall under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion or something else. Because in the end, businesses have to get on with acquiring talent as best they can.
“I want to be an actor and not an observer,” Crispin says. “I think it’s time for all of us to have a common voice and act in concert, so that we can develop better baselines for talent, acquisition, and human resources…I’d love to see a trend this year where we highlight the champions that are trying to improve the industry versus folding to what we’re seeing on the news about the companies that are unwinding DEI. That would just be a nice trend.”
