Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still not clear what you would have a hiring manager do today . I usually have several positions open at any given time; I don't even recall the last black applicant we've seen. I have talented co-workers of many different races (specifically including black), but even without visiting our office, you could guess the percentage breakdown and you wouldn't be far off. I can't hire applicants that don't exist and I…
You can shift your notions of "qualified". You can hire junior engineers and mentor and train them to be successful. Then you can proactively advertise your positions to programs and organizations that have more minority participation. Of course this takes more work for you, the hiring manager, in sourcing and on boarding. But there should be a burden on every hiring manager to correct the systemic diversity problems…
We do hire at all experience levels and several of our successful squad leads are original college hires (having only worked with us), so we have some demonstrated track record of mentoring and retention.
Even in college recruiting (where I'd expect the greatest diversity of candidates), I can't recall any recent black applicants, and except for a somewhat higher ratio of women to men than the industry average, the ratios of college grads seem to track the industry ratios reasonably closely.
I concede that there is a bias towards college grads in industry and stated above, and that nothing is legally barring me from crafting some kind of Cinderella program to seek out possibly qualified candidates who avoided college or who failed to graduate. There would no doubt be some successful candidates that emerged from such a program.
The practical bar to that is my belief that any such single-company program would be utterly uncompetitive versus other efforts I could make in staffing. Opening an out of country office, while hard, is probably much less work per successful candidate, has a higher success rate, and often presents much more compelling economics.
If the above is remotely true, the shortest path to better prospects for minorities is to increase their college attendance, STEM majors, and graduation rates. It also has the practical advantage of having a high level of self-determination and influence; rather than waiting for me to fix their problem (where I necessarily have many competing priorities), they can take initiative to address their problem (where they naturally have more focus and vested interest in the specific outcome).
There is unlikely to emerge a single-company Cinderella type program that will markedly change the industry. The overhead costs are too much and the successes too few. A regional (or even national) charitable or educational institution may be able to move the needle (but even there, the shorter path might well be "encourage college and STEM participation rates")