Sara Bokhari, Head of People and Culture at Mursion, has spent her career working at the intersection of talent acquisition, culture, and inclusion. On Reimagining Company Culture, she sits down with us to talk about what it takes to commit to underrepresented hiring pipelines beyond the press release. Her conversation is refreshingly practical. Sara talks about sourcing partners, interview design, and the unglamorous internal work that determines whether a more diverse pipeline actually translates into a more diverse team.
Her core argument: pipelines are not the bottleneck most leaders think they are. Hiring systems are.
Why Pipeline Talk Often Misses the Point
Companies routinely blame the 'lack of diverse candidates' for slow representation gains. Sara pushes back on that framing. the 2024 Women in the Workplace study from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 54 Black women and 65 Latinas receive the same opportunity, and women of color hold just 7% of C-suite roles. Those gaps are not pipeline problems, they are conversion problems.
The implication is that hiring teams need to look upstream and downstream at the same time. Sourcing partners matter, but the bigger use usually sits inside the funnel: the job description, the screen, the applicant tracking system configuration, the interview rubric, the offer process.
When companies redesign each step of the funnel for fairness, the same sourcing channels suddenly produce more representative hires.
Where Pipelines Actually Break
The screen filter is too narrow
Most resume screens reward pedigree over performance. Sara's teams use structured criteria that focus on demonstrated competencies, not company logos.
Interview panels lack diversity
If the interview loop is monolithic, candidates from underrepresented groups are statistically more likely to drop out at the offer stage. Building diverse panels, with appropriate compensation for the extra work, is one of the highest-ROI moves an HR team can make.
Offer negotiations widen pay gaps
Pay equity discipline at offer time prevents the slow reintroduction of bias that erases otherwise good DEI work.
Building the Pipeline Infrastructure
Sara recommends investing in three layers: long-term partnerships with HBCUs, MSIs, and community organizations; mid-cycle programs like apprenticeships and internships; and short-cycle outreach for active roles. The mix produces a pipeline that does not collapse during hiring freezes.
This is also where a clear DEI strategy earns its keep, by giving talent acquisition leaders explicit permission to invest in relationships that will pay off over years rather than quarters.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Hiring is only half the work. Retaining underrepresented talent depends on a workplace where issues can be raised safely. A DEI hotline paired with investigations management closes the trust loop and keeps inclusion from becoming a one-time recruiting event.
Sara is explicit about this: companies that recruit diverse talent into hostile environments do harm. Reporting infrastructure is part of the duty of care.
Why This Conversation Matters Right Now
The HR field has been through three waves in the last few years: an emergency pivot to distributed work, a wave of public commitments around inclusion, and a slow correction as leaders started measuring which of those commitments actually moved retention and engagement. Conversations like this one matter because they sit on the other side of that correction. The question is no longer whether to invest in culture. The question is which culture investments produce durable results, and which ones look impressive in a press release but quietly fade.
That shift puts pressure on people leaders to be specific. Generic advice about belonging or psychological safety does not survive a budget review. The HR teams that are pulling ahead are the ones that connect cultural commitments to operating systems, instrument the resulting work, and report on outcomes in the same business-critical language the CFO uses for revenue. According to SHRM's reporting on retention strategies, the cost of underinvesting in culture shows up directly in voluntary attrition, and the math gets harder every year.
This is also where employee relations operations becomes a more visible part of the modern People organization. Employee relations is no longer a quiet compliance function; it is the data layer that tells leaders whether their stated values are being lived inside the organization, and it is increasingly the place where cultural drift first becomes visible. Companies that treat ER as part of the culture stack, rather than a separate compliance silo, get better signal earlier and can course-correct before retention numbers turn.
A Practical Playbook for HR Leaders
Translating a great podcast conversation into actual change inside your organization takes a stepwise plan, not a rallying cry. The most consistent leaders we work with run a 90-day discovery loop, a 90-day pilot, and a 90-day expansion that together compress what would otherwise be a multi-year cultural shift into a single calendar year. The discipline is not novel; the willingness to follow it through is.
Discovery is mostly listening. That means structured conversations with managers, frontline employees, and recent leavers, paired with quantitative pulls from your HRIS, ATS, and case-management system. The goal is to triangulate the real story of how the company makes decisions, who feels heard, and where opportunity quietly evaporates. Most HR teams find that the data they already have, surfaced honestly, points to two or three high-impact interventions they had not previously prioritized.
Pilots are deliberately small. Pick one team, one geography, or one stage of the employee journey and instrument it well. Set a clear hypothesis, a measurable target, and a review cadence shorter than a quarter. The teams that pilot this way produce stories the rest of the organization actually wants to copy. The teams that announce company-wide programs without piloting almost always lose momentum somewhere around month four.
Expansion is the patient work. The organizations that scale change well treat the pilot lessons as the operating manual and resist the urge to rebrand the work. Manager training, listening infrastructure, and case-management discipline travel with the program; without those layers, even successful pilots fail to take root in the rest of the company. The leaders who invest in the unglamorous machinery alongside the visible programs are the ones whose work survives the next reorganization.
The throughline across every successful version of this playbook is the same: change is treated as a system, not a moment. Hiring, performance, recognition, manager development, and reporting infrastructure all have to move together for the new culture to take root. The companies that try to redesign one piece in isolation usually find that the surrounding systems quietly pull the program back to baseline within a year. The companies that move the whole stack at once, even imperfectly, usually compound their gains for the next several years.
One last note for HR leaders worried about whether the moment is right to invest. The cost of waiting always looks smaller than the cost of acting until the data comes in, and by then the talent has already left. Companies that delayed manager training a few years ago ended up paying multiples of that price as their first-line leaders left and took institutional knowledge with them. The teams that invested early are the ones now writing case studies. The discipline is to move at the cadence of the workforce, not the cadence of the budget cycle, and the People leaders who hold that line tend to outlast the ones who do not.
Frequently Asked Questions About Underrepresented Pipelines
How long does it take to build a real pipeline?
Most enduring partnerships take two to three years to produce consistent volume. Companies expecting a quarterly fix usually abandon the work right before it starts paying off.
What is the difference between a pipeline and a sourcing channel?
A sourcing channel produces resumes; a pipeline produces relationships. Pipelines include alumni programs, community partnerships, and ongoing engagement that survives the next reorg.
How do I measure pipeline effectiveness?
Track candidate yield by source, conversion rate by stage, and retention at six and 12 months. The numbers reveal which partnerships are actually producing fits, not just bodies.
Should we set hiring quotas?
Most legal counsel advises aspirational targets rather than rigid quotas. The discipline is in tracking and accountability, not in a number.
How do I keep this work funded during a downturn?
Tie it to retention and revenue metrics, not to a stand-alone DEI budget. Programs framed as talent strategy survive cycles that pure DEI line items do not.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Sara's career arc shows what it looks like when an HR leader takes pipelines seriously as infrastructure. The work is patient, the wins compound, and the cost of getting it wrong gets bigger every year. SHRM's report on workplace culture found that employees in positive cultures are nearly four times more likely to stay, that math is a direct return on the investments Sara describes.
See how AllVoices helps people teams turn underrepresented hiring into durable retention.
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