When I was at Google, I was asked if I wanted to make a recruiting trip to my alma mater. I was excited until I found out they were talking about my grad school where I got my MS, and not UB, a large state school where I got my BS. I told them I'd be happy to take a trip to recruit at UB. I got mostly crickets back from that reply. However, I ended up getting signed up for a series where they had a panel of a few HR (sorry, "people ops") folks and a SWE or two talking over Google Hangouts to auditoriums full of kids at FIVE different schools which they called "Long Tail". (and UB wasn't even one of them)
I think they are missing an incredible amount of talent this way. In my circle of friends, there were 3-4 other people that Google would have been lucky to have, and two of them were women They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). There are lots of similar schools all over the country.
When a recruiter contacted me for a position at Google in 2012, I happened to be also taking
Daphne Koller's Coursera class on Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM).
I was puzzled why the recruiter wanted to know my SAT score. He also wanted to know the college and high school I went to and my GRE score and my undergrad GPA ... Keep in mind that I have a BS, MS, Phd in three different engineering fields and over a decade of work experience at well know companies in the Bay area. For a 40 something engineer it seemed odd he would ask me information from two decades ago but I went along assuming he was filling in some boxes for HR.
The first assignment in the Probabilistic Graphical Models class was to predict the likelihood that a candidate would be a good fit for a job given prior Bayesian probabilities for ivy league school attended, SAT score, GRE score, all forming nodes of a decision tree.
I looked at the problem assignment and the recruiters questions and realized what was going on.
Some Stanford grad at Google had convinced HR that they needed an objective way to evaluate
hundreds of candidates and what better way than to use the same methods that they had
learnt from Daphne Koller at Stanford.
I quit the PGM class 'cause it seemed like a tool I would never use.
I decline interviews at Google since I don't have the right Bayesian probabilities that
would trigger a positive outcome for their PGM model.
> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc).
Agreed--I was accepted everywhere I applied save one and I ended up going to the University of Maine. I've never hurt for work and I paid off my student loans by the age of 25. Google sniffs around now (aside: recruiters, even if it's Google maybe you shouldn't assume I want to talk to you and tell me to sign up for a phone call to talk to your sainted ass?) and I have no interest, but the first time I interviewed, when a guy at Google gave me noticeable shade for my filthy state school degree? They could've made a decent bit of money off of me and now that door is likely closed.
I agree - and this is even more true at state schools than the slightly more selective schools (like RPI that I went to).
State schools have people that got into MIT, but didn't go for financial reasons or family reasons. Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true).
School admission is obviously not a perfect indicator of ability, but I suspect while the average and median may be higher (and more tightly distributed) at a school like RPI, a state school will have a lot more outliers.
Everyone is fighting for students from the super selective schools and state schools are largely ignored - students either need referrals to get interviews or jump through a ton of hacker rank like hoops.
This is even ignoring the 'diversity' angle - a lot of really great people are missed because it's hard to break in without knowing someone or having the right credentials.
> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school
Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there?
On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive. For better or worse, school selectivity is tied with rankings -- for every Anthony topping the charts of state school is a graduating class of Anthonys at the elite schools. Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago.
Moreover, Google recruiters are likely already flooded with new grad applicants from non-elite schools, while every year GoogFaceAmaple is pushing forward their recruiting funnel earlier than the competition. Eventually, I imagine they'll simply interview candidates the summer between receiving their college acceptance letter and fall semester freshman year.
Interesting. When I pushed a bit at (well-known tech company), I managed to get a couple of high-GPA CS students from my state university into the internship interview pipeline. These students were personally recommended to me by the school's top (IMO) CS professor. I was particularly excited for one of them, who had a 3.9-something GPA, and who seemed pretty solid technically when I spoke with him on the phone. Unfortunately, he didn't pass the online coding test in order to proceed to the next step. The others did miserably on this test.
Compare that to the students I interviewed for internships from top 5 engineering schools. Among them was one of the best candidates I'd ever encountered, regardless of experience level. He came up with a unique (and quite good) solution to a problem I'd been using as an interview question for years. As someone who had done fairly well in state school, I was floored by how much more well-prepared these students were than I had been.
My story is anecdotal, and there are many factors that can explain what I perceived. But I suspect the top companies have figured out that they get best results in hiring based on a) recent grads from top schools and b) great resumes from experienced devs who maybe didn't start out at top schools & top companies.
On the plus side from a diversity standpoint, the students I interviewed from these top schools were both male and female, and from a wider variety of ethnic backgrounds than I usually see in the hiring pipeline.
Like many people on HN, I've been through the Google recruitment cattle grinder a few times - the usual observations about absurd process that leads to terrible fit apply. I'm even open at the beginning about various conditions of employment if they want to move forward...such as a desire not to move. They always move forward anyways and then at the end ask if I'd be willing to move to whatever office location has the position.
At this point I tell them not to bother if I get contacted or I just ignore the recruiter. It's effectively a pretty big waste of time 98% of the time and they're just making some kind of internal metric so that positions can be claimed to have been offered fairly.
I think what really bothers me about this process in general, and it applies to a great many companies, is that they contacted me. In that they sought me out. I didn't apply. So a little courtesy on that front would be helpful.
> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc).
And how about people who couldn't get into an elite school at 17, but end up learning a lot at the state school? It seems odd to be so preoccupied by what someone's capability was when they were in high school, rather than what it is now.
I work at Google and have done some university recruiting (not a ton, but some) and I have not had this experience. Recently I saw a list of hundreds of schools of all sizes and locations that we were committed to sending reps to, so I think Google is actually way out ahead of the field when it comes to not only looking at Ivy League / Stanford / MIT.
The odd thing is, the university I went to, not in the US, is ranked a bit higher than UB in the international rankings, but definitely the same general area. And it gets lots of attention from Google recruiters and those from similar companies, I believe. The interviews are still fairly hard work, I hear, but they seem less fussy about universities outside the US.
My experience is that in any school / college / organisation, there is a distribution of smart / switched on / less switched on / absolute idiots. The difference between the better universities and less prestigious ones isn't that every student is excellent or bad (I have seen enough falling in the last category above in prestigious universities), just that there is a higher concentration of better students.
So it does make sense for companies to target these schools / universities, it's a matter of efficiency for their marketing efforts.
It doesn't make sense for companies to make it hard for non target schools as they are cutting themselves from lots of potentially excellent candidates (I suspect certain companies to automatically reject applications on their websites if the university isn't one of a list).
I’m a current UB student. There are some more visits from the top here, but only Bloomberg has any real recruiting events... I think google and Facebook appear sometimes but more to give talks and in smaller/tucked away areas. It’s quite hard to get seen by anyone.
I interviewed with them recently and I didn’t get any condescending comments about my SUNY education like I did a few years ago — from a recruiter who was reaching outbound to me!
Unrelated, but please remember that not everyone here is a native English speaker. It is hard to make head or tails of your comment with all these abbreviations
They understand perfectly. They are hoping for rich, well connected kids from rich families that can bring in money and power into the organization. They may have tried some "ordinary" people before and were befuddled when it did not bring in $100 million dollars and several political contacts.
>They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons
why stop here though, couldn't you just extend this argument to people who go community colleges or online schools or even people don't go any school ?
I went to a non-top tier undergraduate school. I made efforts--at big companies as well as the one I founded--to recruit from my alma mater. I ended up defaulting to NYU, Harvard and Stanford.
Career services at non-top tier schools are shit. Once, as a personal favor, I offered to help a company with a well-known CEO recruit from my state school. When I brought it up with a dean I knew, career services got mad. They said I should have gone through them first. Guarding their gatekeeping function was of greater concern than doing their job. They then suggested this CEO come to their fall freshman career fair. I said no, it's a high-profile company, they'd prefer if you curated a list for them. (MIT and NYU, amongst others, do this.) No response.
Consider, too, that 90% of recent-college graduate recruiting (in finance, at least) is less about finding brilliance than finding someone who won't make dumb mistakes. The Ivy League produces a consistent product. They hold no monopoly on genius. But the variance around others' outputs is too high for a young firm.
All that said, I never turn down an outbound email. (It's how I broke into the industry.) I also think it's important, as your firm develops, to keep an eye on broadening recruiting.
Closing note: in response to recent news, I started thinking about our workplace's gender diversity. It's bad, and it matches that of the schools we recruit from.
> Career services at non-top tier schools are shit.
Doing my undergrad and PhD at an average large state school, I was really lucky to get an internship (and now job), essentially by word of mouth and my PhD advisor.
Now that I'm doing a part-time Masters at an elite-ish (top 10) school, I'm realizing how amazing career services can be. They send out weekly emails saying:
"James Dimon is coming to speak." "Dir. of Engineering from Exxon will be taking questions." "Bring your resume and chat with recruiters." "Women's Society will be hosting Barclays tonight."
My state school had nothing. All of the leg work was done by individual students.
It's founded by 3 graduates of Michigan Tech University, a small but well-regarded school that even other Michiganders think is far north. Their goal is to level the playing field for internships and first jobs.
It was great to meet people so sincere about solving this problem.
>It's bad, and it matches that of the schools we recruit from.
I don't understand this. If you're matching the diversity of the market, that would seem to me that your recruiting practices are unbiased, which is good, right?
Once upon a time, UT Austin CS department has its own recruiting program. They were good. They even got me my first job and I'm the worst interviewee you've ever heard of; I have the interpersonal skills of a sea cucumber.
Then the college of natural sciences took over. I'm glad I was gone; from what I hear, it sucks.
Is there any way you can think of for working around this? Some actual method of recruiting outsiders of the system in a realistic way?
I've always assumed that open source would be one of the places to go for such telemetry, but have never known where contributing would actually furnish that kind of benefit. It would be good to know if there were projects that are actually fit that criteria, instead of merely being coincidentally worked on by a lot of employees.
As an outsider in another country, my impression seems to be that the quest for diversity seems to have turned into something of a religion in several cultures. In principle, as a solution to the problem I am principally all in favor of anonymous, faceless, no alma mater preference etc. interviews and application processes, and/or whatever other measures are suggested to remove the possibility of bias or unconscious bias or anything else that is theorized/proven to exist and affect outcomes.
I am also all in favor of organizations taking steps to address the various negative experiences that are somewhat typically encountered in various demographics, e.g. harassment, etc. as well as affirmative action as a way to attempt to correct this. Based on the fervor with which it is pursued (which is admirable in many ways), I seem to be convinced that if these measures have a negligible effect on outcomes, the crusade for diversity will still continue, as if to suggest that equality of outcome is a worthy goal, as opposed to equality of opportunity. The latter is definitely an unjust status quo worthy of fighting, but the former seems to completely throw away the notion of free will.
It's almost akin to a scientist who so adamantly wants to prove their theory that they will do anything to ensure the result is consistent with the hypothesis.
Then again I could be wrong and people will actually stop pushing for it after these practices are instituted.
I was an undergraduate at a no-name university for various personal reasons. A Google, Microsoft and other big tech co offices were nearby. Throughout my undergrad, not a single event, talk or recruiting opportunity emerged. I understand this: the top people are the same everywhere but it does not economically make sense to do events to potentially hire 1-2 people.
I am now at a world famous grad school and there are talks, events, opportunities every week. I would say the best 5% at the undergraduate school were approximately at least as good as the average undergraduate here.
Unfortunately, economically it makes sense to focus recruiting events only at certain schools.
How could companies reach the great students at unknown schools systematically?
> No company, not even the tech giants, can cover every school or every resume submitted online.
Are we talking about the tech companies that hoover up all the data in the world and analyze it for profit? I'm pretty sure they could figure out how to cover every resume submitted online.
But making this claim was a required part of the setup for what comes next: a sales pitch for this company's service. I stopped reading here, but wished I'd stopped during the over-dramatized hypothetical interview stories at the beginning.
This is a good idea in theory, but the problem in practice is that for every Emily or Anthony, there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they’re in, are completely incompetent. I often find that those who are so keen on “hiring broadly” have never worked in a company that hires primarily from Podunk State - your expectations of your employees have to be so much lower.
The key is not to focus on the schools (rather than to focus extra on state schools). Instead, develop methods for identifying talent based on its own merits, regardless of where it is or what university it went to.
This is true not just for engineering hires. I recently experienced this with more evolved roles such as PM and PMMs.
Diversity and inclusion biases go beyond educational background. I have noticed the big tech firms (experienced this with a social network giant) are more biased to hire from a big consulting firm like McKinsey or Bain.
Despite having the requisite experience & education for the role, I got the boilerplate response without even talking to anyone. Some sleuthing revealed this big tech firm tends to recruit heavily from McKinsey. Most people at the role had this trajectory BA at Ivy League --> 2 yrs work exp --> MBA (Top 10) ---> Big Consulting ---> Big tech.
This seems to bode well who could afford either an ivy league education and an expensive MBA. Leaves little room for folks with street experience. On the other side, maybe it calls for long-term gorilla marketing tactics to really sell your personal brand.
Isn't this one of the primary reasons why those particular schools are "elite". Because of the alumni base and "connections" you can make at these schools? It sucks but I feel like most students enter college knowing how this system works and therefore try their darnest to get into one of those elite schools. I went to a school that had career fairs with 50 kids standing in every line waiting for their resumes to be put into a trash pile. Save for 5-10 students who may have gotten professor recommendations it was a complete waste of time. Only now am I getting reached by recruiters from the Big 4. Honestly I can't even fully wrap my head around having that kind of opportunity at 22-23 years old.
There are actually two overlapping long tail effects here: top schools and huge companies. Only one quadrant of this 2x2 grid works well for on-campus recruiting.
For everyone else, there’s a discoverability problem: it's hard for students to discover exciting startups, and it's hard for startups to get in front of and filter for the best young engineers.
It's not irrational for companies to hire from a small set of schools: there's just no other way they can effectively allocate resources. That's why there's opportunity for companies like Triplebyte and Interviewing.io to innovate in new ways of screening, and as a result, get more data and insight while making the process better for both engineers and companies. A similar example would be what we learned about bootcamps vs. recent college grads, which other companies couldn't have learned yet because they just reject the bootcamp grads as a broad heuristic: https://triplebyte.com/blog/bootcamps-vs-college
I would bet significant amounts of money that if you looked at people based on their in-job performance blinded to background you'd find insignificant contributions from education.
Not interviewing, I would bet that people from top-tier schools interview very well, as I think Triplebyte discussed the other day. I'm talking about actual bottom-line performance in the job, which in my experience shows little correlation with school or even undergrad degree for people with any experience at all.
If jobs were screened entirely by competency and personality/fit, with interviews/resumes somehow conveying those aspects of a candidate without any other identifying information revealed about the applicants (no school, age, sex, name, ethnicity, etc), how different would the end result of hiring be? That would make for an interesting study in a variety of industries and fields, if one hasn't been done already.
That's what were trying to achieve at Vervoe. Our hiring software is designed to assess candidates primarily via task-based simulations created by experts - that means interview questions that help the Employer assess your skill and judge the candidates based on their answers mostly.
When I myself was hired by Vervoe, I didn't submit any resume, because as our CEO says, resumes are documents about past and don't necessarily show how the candidate will perform now and in future. I only submitted the skill assessing questions. My school (I have none), age, sex, ethnicity, location didn't matter.
I am glad that articles and comments like this exist, shows we're not alone on our mission to show that diversity works better :).
Tech companies rightly or wrongly (the article doesn't make that strong of a case against) are just outsourcing part of their recruiting to elite universities.
Figuring how much investment flows from tech companies (through the companies and the employees as alumni donators) to these elite universities, it may be a worthwhile investment.
It probably is one of the few reliable signals at scale. Sure, you can pluck out a few smart people from your local podunk uni who for various reasons really are that smart but, didn't get into an elite school but, if you need to hire 200 really smart, really capable engineers this year to feed your growth pipeline Stanford, Harvard, et al isn't that bad.
Additionally, it looks good for VCs to say that I have someone from Harvard or Stanford or etc on the team.
I recently watched part of this debate and was struck by an admission Peter Thiel dropped about school hire diversity...
"""Peter Thiel:
Thank you. Let me actually just start with that question. You know, I went to Stanford undergrad, Stanford law school. Throughout the '90s, I had a belief that education was absolutely paramount. We should only hire people that went to the best schools. And - and we discriminated on this basis very aggressively in hiring at PayPal. And I use this -- and I used to -- I thought this was the most important thing in our society. And over the last four or five years, I've gradually come to shift my views on it for a number of different reasons. The narrow technology context in Silicon Valley, that I saw so many very talented people who had not gone through college tracks and who had still done extraordinary well. In some ways, they were also more creative."""
Too Many Kids Go To College- Intelligence Squared U.S.
https://youtu.be/7VTQ-dBYSlQ?t=468
>interviewing.io evaluates students based on their coding skills, not their resume. We are open to students regardless of their university affiliation, college major, and pretty much anything else (we ask for your class year to make sure you’re available when companies want you and that’s about it). Unlike traditional campus recruiting, we attract students organically (getting free practice with engineers from top companies is a pretty big draw) from schools big and small from across the country.
Sweet pitch and of course a genuine problem. But companies have very limited resources and they use them at elite schools which have already stringent requirements to get in. Alternatively, I now see most companies are giving a hackerrank test as a start irrespective of your school. I guess this is a starting point to avoid the bias towards top schools.
Regarding diversity, have you needed to steer away from any particular anonymous interviewing techniques because that technique heavily favored a particular demographic? A silly example would be that you no longer allow people to do tests at 8:30 a.m. GMT on Tuesdays because only a certain demographic did disproportionately well in that timeslot. If yes, can you give an example?
Side note, I really liked the interview you gave Software Engineering Daily. That was the first time in a long time I heard about an attempt to make technical recruiting better that actually sounded better to me! [1]
I've worked on a few teams at my job that only seemed to hire from GA Tech, MIT or Purdue (engineering), though I was the odd one out in coming from a non-engineering background (math) from a state school. Intellectual inbreeding is a big problem in some areas. New ideas tend to emerge when folks with separate (or even seemingly disparate) perspectives find ways to address a common problem. This can describe multidisciplinary teams, but also teams with folks who learned the same subject in different ways.
That said, I do agree that I've always been impressed with prospective hires & the students we've mentored from top-tier schools. But I also know that a great student could come from anywhere, and if they also happen to be local it can be a real value multiplier.
This article is about first jobs out of school (interesting to me b/c my kid just started university).
How much does it matter after that first job? I couldn't tell you were any of my co-workers went to school -- in hiring the work a candidate did previously and what people I know say about their work matters.
However I am quite conscious that people give me the benefit of the doubt based on where I went to school (I hope it's obvious I mean people who can look me up on LinkedIn, not random people). I've had some absurdly far-fetched ideas, some of which turned out to be quite lucrative and some of which turned out to be stupid. I doubt I would have gotten the time of day without that brand name.
Agreed. As someone who recently graduated from a relatively good (2100 median SAT score) school that ISN'T a top five CS school, it was absolutely insulting how often I was completely ignored by companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. I understand that the median of talent is probably worse at my school than at, say, MIT or Stanford, but the top quarter of my CS year was full of brilliant people who had an unnecessarily difficult time getting hired by top tier tech companies for no good reason.
These companies could definitely improve their hiring quality by drawing top-tier students at lesser schools instead of hiring below-median talent from target top schools.
[+] [-] drewg123|8 years ago|reply
I think they are missing an incredible amount of talent this way. In my circle of friends, there were 3-4 other people that Google would have been lucky to have, and two of them were women They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). There are lots of similar schools all over the country.
[+] [-] viewtransform|8 years ago|reply
I was puzzled why the recruiter wanted to know my SAT score. He also wanted to know the college and high school I went to and my GRE score and my undergrad GPA ... Keep in mind that I have a BS, MS, Phd in three different engineering fields and over a decade of work experience at well know companies in the Bay area. For a 40 something engineer it seemed odd he would ask me information from two decades ago but I went along assuming he was filling in some boxes for HR.
The first assignment in the Probabilistic Graphical Models class was to predict the likelihood that a candidate would be a good fit for a job given prior Bayesian probabilities for ivy league school attended, SAT score, GRE score, all forming nodes of a decision tree.
I looked at the problem assignment and the recruiters questions and realized what was going on. Some Stanford grad at Google had convinced HR that they needed an objective way to evaluate hundreds of candidates and what better way than to use the same methods that they had learnt from Daphne Koller at Stanford.
I quit the PGM class 'cause it seemed like a tool I would never use. I decline interviews at Google since I don't have the right Bayesian probabilities that would trigger a positive outcome for their PGM model.
[+] [-] eropple|8 years ago|reply
Agreed--I was accepted everywhere I applied save one and I ended up going to the University of Maine. I've never hurt for work and I paid off my student loans by the age of 25. Google sniffs around now (aside: recruiters, even if it's Google maybe you shouldn't assume I want to talk to you and tell me to sign up for a phone call to talk to your sainted ass?) and I have no interest, but the first time I interviewed, when a guy at Google gave me noticeable shade for my filthy state school degree? They could've made a decent bit of money off of me and now that door is likely closed.
[+] [-] gonehome|8 years ago|reply
State schools have people that got into MIT, but didn't go for financial reasons or family reasons. Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true).
School admission is obviously not a perfect indicator of ability, but I suspect while the average and median may be higher (and more tightly distributed) at a school like RPI, a state school will have a lot more outliers.
Everyone is fighting for students from the super selective schools and state schools are largely ignored - students either need referrals to get interviews or jump through a ton of hacker rank like hoops.
This is even ignoring the 'diversity' angle - a lot of really great people are missed because it's hard to break in without knowing someone or having the right credentials.
[+] [-] jldugger|8 years ago|reply
Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there?
On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive. For better or worse, school selectivity is tied with rankings -- for every Anthony topping the charts of state school is a graduating class of Anthonys at the elite schools. Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago.
Moreover, Google recruiters are likely already flooded with new grad applicants from non-elite schools, while every year GoogFaceAmaple is pushing forward their recruiting funnel earlier than the competition. Eventually, I imagine they'll simply interview candidates the summer between receiving their college acceptance letter and fall semester freshman year.
[+] [-] mypalmike|8 years ago|reply
Compare that to the students I interviewed for internships from top 5 engineering schools. Among them was one of the best candidates I'd ever encountered, regardless of experience level. He came up with a unique (and quite good) solution to a problem I'd been using as an interview question for years. As someone who had done fairly well in state school, I was floored by how much more well-prepared these students were than I had been.
My story is anecdotal, and there are many factors that can explain what I perceived. But I suspect the top companies have figured out that they get best results in hiring based on a) recent grads from top schools and b) great resumes from experienced devs who maybe didn't start out at top schools & top companies.
On the plus side from a diversity standpoint, the students I interviewed from these top schools were both male and female, and from a wider variety of ethnic backgrounds than I usually see in the hiring pipeline.
[+] [-] bane|8 years ago|reply
At this point I tell them not to bother if I get contacted or I just ignore the recruiter. It's effectively a pretty big waste of time 98% of the time and they're just making some kind of internal metric so that positions can be claimed to have been offered fairly.
I think what really bothers me about this process in general, and it applies to a great many companies, is that they contacted me. In that they sought me out. I didn't apply. So a little courtesy on that front would be helpful.
[+] [-] Chathamization|8 years ago|reply
And how about people who couldn't get into an elite school at 17, but end up learning a lot at the state school? It seems odd to be so preoccupied by what someone's capability was when they were in high school, rather than what it is now.
[+] [-] habosa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] learc83|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|8 years ago|reply
My experience is that in any school / college / organisation, there is a distribution of smart / switched on / less switched on / absolute idiots. The difference between the better universities and less prestigious ones isn't that every student is excellent or bad (I have seen enough falling in the last category above in prestigious universities), just that there is a higher concentration of better students.
So it does make sense for companies to target these schools / universities, it's a matter of efficiency for their marketing efforts.
It doesn't make sense for companies to make it hard for non target schools as they are cutting themselves from lots of potentially excellent candidates (I suspect certain companies to automatically reject applications on their websites if the university isn't one of a list).
[+] [-] SolaceQuantum|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mseebach|8 years ago|reply
Don't they have a referral bonus scheme pretty much exactly for this?
[+] [-] chaostheory|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
I interviewed with them recently and I didn’t get any condescending comments about my SUNY education like I did a few years ago — from a recruiter who was reaching outbound to me!
[+] [-] busterarm|8 years ago|reply
Dropping out of that place was still one of the best decisions I've ever made though.
[+] [-] kobeya|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leesalminen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andreaferretti|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeonfire|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominotw|8 years ago|reply
why stop here though, couldn't you just extend this argument to people who go community colleges or online schools or even people don't go any school ?
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
Career services at non-top tier schools are shit. Once, as a personal favor, I offered to help a company with a well-known CEO recruit from my state school. When I brought it up with a dean I knew, career services got mad. They said I should have gone through them first. Guarding their gatekeeping function was of greater concern than doing their job. They then suggested this CEO come to their fall freshman career fair. I said no, it's a high-profile company, they'd prefer if you curated a list for them. (MIT and NYU, amongst others, do this.) No response.
Consider, too, that 90% of recent-college graduate recruiting (in finance, at least) is less about finding brilliance than finding someone who won't make dumb mistakes. The Ivy League produces a consistent product. They hold no monopoly on genius. But the variance around others' outputs is too high for a young firm.
All that said, I never turn down an outbound email. (It's how I broke into the industry.) I also think it's important, as your firm develops, to keep an eye on broadening recruiting.
Closing note: in response to recent news, I started thinking about our workplace's gender diversity. It's bad, and it matches that of the schools we recruit from.
[+] [-] sndean|8 years ago|reply
Doing my undergrad and PhD at an average large state school, I was really lucky to get an internship (and now job), essentially by word of mouth and my PhD advisor.
Now that I'm doing a part-time Masters at an elite-ish (top 10) school, I'm realizing how amazing career services can be. They send out weekly emails saying:
"James Dimon is coming to speak." "Dir. of Engineering from Exxon will be taking questions." "Bring your resume and chat with recruiters." "Women's Society will be hosting Barclays tonight."
My state school had nothing. All of the leg work was done by individual students.
[+] [-] wpietri|8 years ago|reply
https://www.joinhandshake.com/
It's founded by 3 graduates of Michigan Tech University, a small but well-regarded school that even other Michiganders think is far north. Their goal is to level the playing field for internships and first jobs.
It was great to meet people so sincere about solving this problem.
[+] [-] busterarm|8 years ago|reply
We're attached to the marketing team (~80%+ women), but our company is in a very unpopular industry (plantiff's law).
[+] [-] Consultant32452|8 years ago|reply
I don't understand this. If you're matching the diversity of the market, that would seem to me that your recruiting practices are unbiased, which is good, right?
[+] [-] mcguire|8 years ago|reply
Then the college of natural sciences took over. I'm glad I was gone; from what I hear, it sucks.
[+] [-] mjevans|8 years ago|reply
I've always assumed that open source would be one of the places to go for such telemetry, but have never known where contributing would actually furnish that kind of benefit. It would be good to know if there were projects that are actually fit that criteria, instead of merely being coincidentally worked on by a lot of employees.
[+] [-] wolco|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamnemecek|8 years ago|reply
I'm guessing that "Career services are shit." is more accurate.
[+] [-] fareesh|8 years ago|reply
I am also all in favor of organizations taking steps to address the various negative experiences that are somewhat typically encountered in various demographics, e.g. harassment, etc. as well as affirmative action as a way to attempt to correct this. Based on the fervor with which it is pursued (which is admirable in many ways), I seem to be convinced that if these measures have a negligible effect on outcomes, the crusade for diversity will still continue, as if to suggest that equality of outcome is a worthy goal, as opposed to equality of opportunity. The latter is definitely an unjust status quo worthy of fighting, but the former seems to completely throw away the notion of free will.
It's almost akin to a scientist who so adamantly wants to prove their theory that they will do anything to ensure the result is consistent with the hypothesis.
Then again I could be wrong and people will actually stop pushing for it after these practices are instituted.
[+] [-] naturalgradient|8 years ago|reply
I am now at a world famous grad school and there are talks, events, opportunities every week. I would say the best 5% at the undergraduate school were approximately at least as good as the average undergraduate here.
Unfortunately, economically it makes sense to focus recruiting events only at certain schools.
How could companies reach the great students at unknown schools systematically?
[+] [-] gnicholas|8 years ago|reply
Are we talking about the tech companies that hoover up all the data in the world and analyze it for profit? I'm pretty sure they could figure out how to cover every resume submitted online.
But making this claim was a required part of the setup for what comes next: a sales pitch for this company's service. I stopped reading here, but wished I'd stopped during the over-dramatized hypothetical interview stories at the beginning.
[+] [-] w1ntermute|8 years ago|reply
The key is not to focus on the schools (rather than to focus extra on state schools). Instead, develop methods for identifying talent based on its own merits, regardless of where it is or what university it went to.
[+] [-] jroseattle|8 years ago|reply
1) Remove the candidate's name/address. Replace with local-to-office = yes|no. Leave phone for screening call.
2) Replace the candidate's education credentials with yes|no on post-HS attendance, and the focus of study. No other information necessary.
It's made a huge difference to us.
[+] [-] KeepTalking|8 years ago|reply
Diversity and inclusion biases go beyond educational background. I have noticed the big tech firms (experienced this with a social network giant) are more biased to hire from a big consulting firm like McKinsey or Bain.
Despite having the requisite experience & education for the role, I got the boilerplate response without even talking to anyone. Some sleuthing revealed this big tech firm tends to recruit heavily from McKinsey. Most people at the role had this trajectory BA at Ivy League --> 2 yrs work exp --> MBA (Top 10) ---> Big Consulting ---> Big tech.
This seems to bode well who could afford either an ivy league education and an expensive MBA. Leaves little room for folks with street experience. On the other side, maybe it calls for long-term gorilla marketing tactics to really sell your personal brand.
[+] [-] southphillyman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] compumike|8 years ago|reply
For everyone else, there’s a discoverability problem: it's hard for students to discover exciting startups, and it's hard for startups to get in front of and filter for the best young engineers.
It's not irrational for companies to hire from a small set of schools: there's just no other way they can effectively allocate resources. That's why there's opportunity for companies like Triplebyte and Interviewing.io to innovate in new ways of screening, and as a result, get more data and insight while making the process better for both engineers and companies. A similar example would be what we learned about bootcamps vs. recent college grads, which other companies couldn't have learned yet because they just reject the bootcamp grads as a broad heuristic: https://triplebyte.com/blog/bootcamps-vs-college
[+] [-] jaggederest|8 years ago|reply
Not interviewing, I would bet that people from top-tier schools interview very well, as I think Triplebyte discussed the other day. I'm talking about actual bottom-line performance in the job, which in my experience shows little correlation with school or even undergrad degree for people with any experience at all.
[+] [-] notadoc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johny115|8 years ago|reply
When I myself was hired by Vervoe, I didn't submit any resume, because as our CEO says, resumes are documents about past and don't necessarily show how the candidate will perform now and in future. I only submitted the skill assessing questions. My school (I have none), age, sex, ethnicity, location didn't matter.
I am glad that articles and comments like this exist, shows we're not alone on our mission to show that diversity works better :).
[+] [-] slackstation|8 years ago|reply
Figuring how much investment flows from tech companies (through the companies and the employees as alumni donators) to these elite universities, it may be a worthwhile investment.
It probably is one of the few reliable signals at scale. Sure, you can pluck out a few smart people from your local podunk uni who for various reasons really are that smart but, didn't get into an elite school but, if you need to hire 200 really smart, really capable engineers this year to feed your growth pipeline Stanford, Harvard, et al isn't that bad.
Additionally, it looks good for VCs to say that I have someone from Harvard or Stanford or etc on the team.
[+] [-] jxramos|8 years ago|reply
"""Peter Thiel: Thank you. Let me actually just start with that question. You know, I went to Stanford undergrad, Stanford law school. Throughout the '90s, I had a belief that education was absolutely paramount. We should only hire people that went to the best schools. And - and we discriminated on this basis very aggressively in hiring at PayPal. And I use this -- and I used to -- I thought this was the most important thing in our society. And over the last four or five years, I've gradually come to shift my views on it for a number of different reasons. The narrow technology context in Silicon Valley, that I saw so many very talented people who had not gone through college tracks and who had still done extraordinary well. In some ways, they were also more creative.""" Too Many Kids Go To College- Intelligence Squared U.S. https://youtu.be/7VTQ-dBYSlQ?t=468
[+] [-] tiggybear|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vthallam|8 years ago|reply
Sweet pitch and of course a genuine problem. But companies have very limited resources and they use them at elite schools which have already stringent requirements to get in. Alternatively, I now see most companies are giving a hackerrank test as a start irrespective of your school. I guess this is a starting point to avoid the bias towards top schools.
[+] [-] amorphid|8 years ago|reply
Regarding diversity, have you needed to steer away from any particular anonymous interviewing techniques because that technique heavily favored a particular demographic? A silly example would be that you no longer allow people to do tests at 8:30 a.m. GMT on Tuesdays because only a certain demographic did disproportionately well in that timeslot. If yes, can you give an example?
Side note, I really liked the interview you gave Software Engineering Daily. That was the first time in a long time I heard about an attempt to make technical recruiting better that actually sounded better to me! [1]
[1] https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/10/19/interviewing...
[+] [-] thearn4|8 years ago|reply
That said, I do agree that I've always been impressed with prospective hires & the students we've mentored from top-tier schools. But I also know that a great student could come from anywhere, and if they also happen to be local it can be a real value multiplier.
[+] [-] gumby|8 years ago|reply
How much does it matter after that first job? I couldn't tell you were any of my co-workers went to school -- in hiring the work a candidate did previously and what people I know say about their work matters.
However I am quite conscious that people give me the benefit of the doubt based on where I went to school (I hope it's obvious I mean people who can look me up on LinkedIn, not random people). I've had some absurdly far-fetched ideas, some of which turned out to be quite lucrative and some of which turned out to be stupid. I doubt I would have gotten the time of day without that brand name.
[+] [-] lambda_lover|8 years ago|reply
These companies could definitely improve their hiring quality by drawing top-tier students at lesser schools instead of hiring below-median talent from target top schools.