There is an implicit notion that hiring diverse candidates (especially the first ones) means you need to compromise on core competencies to get the job done. While it may be logical on the surface, if you start to think a bit broader about what you are trying to achieve (outside the diversity for the sake of diversity realm, but as a business) you will see this isn't true.
Let's talk about an example we all know exists, tech careers are dominated by men, particularly Asian and white men. I've spoken to other hiring managers who want to bring more diverse voices into their teams, but feel like they need to lower the bar to hire someone from a non-traditional background. After all, someone who didn't have the benefit of going to a good school and working on tech projects outside of school or taking an internship, may seem like a weaker candidate if you put them against someone who did have those advantages.
However, this is rooted in a flawed hiring process for engineers (and this is now extending to other jobs in tech like data scientists, product managers, etc). While it would be easier to hire candidates who pass a certain level of leetcode or technical challenges, especially for junior hires this is a bad idea. These tests are terrible barometers for potential success within your organization. What you should be looking for is the ability to bring a fresh perspective to problems, the ability to learn new information quickly, the ability to communicate and in so doing make others around them better.
This means you need to spend less time trying to replicate the way Google hired back in the mid 2000s and focus on your direct needs. Work backwards from what a successful hire looks like and be open minded when you meet a candidate who has a different background than you expected. This takes a lot longer for a hiring manager screening resumes at the outset, but you quickly adapt to this new way of evaluating candidates.
One proposed solution I've seen is the use of scorecards for evaluating candidates, especially when a candidate has to be evaluated by several people and you'd like to make sure everyone is looking for the right set of red, yellow, and green flags. However, these scorecards should be designed to allow for new interpretations of candidate success. If they are a reflection of the implicit biases that are currently gatekeeping diverse candidates, you are in fact making it harder for a hiring manager or interviewer to say "I think this person could be successful here, just not in the way we originally anticipated".
Another problem with these scorecards, or other mechanisms to make your hiring process more 'colorblind', is that the candidates are often already at a numerical disadvantage. If you put out a job posting for a software engineer, the applicants will overwhelmingly be in the demographic that is over-represented. In order to foster diversity you can not abdicate responsibility by saying "there's a sourcing problem", that just passes the buck. If you want to help you need to select explicitly for diverse candidates to give them that fair shot. This isn't to say you need to lower the bar, but you should change the way you evaluate since success comes in different forms and in today's hiring climate, you should take success however you can get it.
Finally, I do want to point out that while you should be lifting out diverse candidates from your hiring pool, you should only hire one where you have a good faith belief that they can be successful. While representation is important, very visible failures also have a disproportionate effect. In many cases you may need to tweak your onboarding or mentoring process to achieve said success, this is of course worth the effort.
As you become better at this process, you will see unintended beneficial consequences in second-order effects. Your previous hires will broaden their minds and learn to think differently about problems, you could gain a better understanding of your target markets or demographics (especially true for product management positions) or even tap into new ones. You will also be exposing everyone to different behaviors that often enrich the company culture. All in all, even if you are a skeptic about hiring diverse candidates for the sake of creating visible representation, there are good business reasons why you would want to consider adding diversity into your talent sourcing.