According to this Wall Street Journal story, Google is the latest company to join the bandwagon of anti-blackness sweeping the tech industry in the wake of Trump’s return to the White House. They emailed their staff and said Google “would no longer set hiring targets to improve representation in its workforce”.

What they’re really saying with that statement is that they’re no longer going to look everywhere for the best talent. Google’s claim that they will “continue opening and expanding offices in cities with diverse workforces” doesn’t seem sincere or trustworthy either. Entirely unaddressed by the story is the fate of the former Howard West (and current Tech Exchange), Google’s partnership with select HBCUs and HSIs to increase the number of black and Hispanic students in computer science. Even the retention of affinity groups for minority employees seems like a cynical move to prevent a mass exodus of employees that would be bad for PR somehow in a way that multiple rounds of arbitrary layoffs have failed to be.

What Google, Amazon, Meta, and so many other companies are doing in not just abandoning any prior goals to seek talent everywhere, but scrubbing any evidence that they ever did so from their websites and annual reports creates an opportunity. The opportunity is for those of us who are hiring managers at companies who still believe in looking everywhere for talent to make ourselves a destination for those folks. This isn’t diversity for its own sake. This is about winning in the marketplace by beating your competitors with talented people they choose to overlook. When our results—especially the financial ones—prove superior to our cowardly competition, we need to be clear that our commitment to finding and hiring overlooked talent is why we’re winning.