To some extent, it doesn't really matter what they select for. If anything, I think they're selecting for an ability to figure out the rules and "play the game."
i.e. if you can't figure out a way to work the system to get into a top school and get a > 3.5 GPA, you're not going to be able to navigate client politics on a consulting project. Similarly, if you can find a way to make yourself seem really interesting on your resume, you'll probably be able to present yourself in a polished way to a VP at your bank.
If you're a hacker who doesn't want to "play the game" (i.e. you skip college, or go to a state university for free), it's likely that you're not going to be a good fit for these kinds of big firms.
I was head of east coast undergraduate recruiting at a consulting firm in LA. I'd say that the article is mostly accurate, on the whole.
I used to look through thousands of resumes at east coast Ivies. I'd basically throw away anything that had under a 3.3 GPA or a 1350 SAT, unless there was something completely out-of-this-league in the extracurriculars.
The issue is the same one that YC faces. There are too many applicants for these positions, and not enough time to adequately evaluate them. So if there's some sort of red flag on the application, the expected probability of making a hire after the interview is lower and it just doesn't make sense to interview when there are better resumes available.
It's like playing texas holdem. In heads up, a king-two has over a 50% chance of winning. But when there are 10 other hands, you don't want to take the risk of someone having an Ace. Similarly, there are lots of winning candidates out there, but there isn't enough time to interview them all.
If I could go back and re-engineer the process, I'd use far more statistics. I'm certain there would be something programmatic that would figure out a way to do it right.
I'd be willing to bet that in the next 15 years someone is going to go Billy Beane on Bain McK and BCG, pick up the talent that seems to be falling in between the cracks, apply technology to the consulting process, and make a killing.
Zoho has been doing this very successfully in India: scooping up bright high school students that cannot get into a college (typically for financial reasons) and training them internally.
How does someone in your position view a low GPA, say 2.5, considering the applicant had to work full time during school? I mean actually pay the bills waiting tables work, not 5 hours a week at a dentists office. (Also, a difficult major, say math at a top though not ivey program)
In this position, what hope if any does an applicant have?
I'd be willing to bet that in the next 15 years someone is going to go Billy Beane on Bain McK and BCG, pick up the talent that seems to be falling in between the cracks, apply technology to the consulting process, and make a killing.
Actually, I think those firms are pretty good at selecting the type of person they want. Sure, the 90th-percentile Penn State grad is much smarter than the 30th-percentile Harvard graduate. For technology, you'd rather have the PSU grad who can code. On the other hand, for McKinsey, the latter is arguably a "better" hire. Why? Because investment banking and management consulting are about image and the ability to sell oneself; being 15 IQ points smarter doesn't do much. Not all Ivy League students are very bright (some are, some aren't) but what can be said of almost every one of them (with their admission to the most selective universities as strong evidence) is that they're good at selling themselves.
Articles like this should really lay to rest the idea that there are rational market forces at work behind compensation.
One thing the article doesn't go into is how insanely easy it is to game this system if you've the knack for standardized exams. The LSAT requires no prior knowledge, and simply tests how quickly you can work with logic in your head. With a 4.0 in basket weaving, and a 175 on the LSAT, you're almost guaranteed admission to Harvard Law with a $160k+bonus job waiting for you at the other end.
Except that admission to Harvard Law doesn't guarantee a $160k+bonus job these days! And my understanding is that being in the top of your class (or top 50%) in law school is more difficult than a 4.0 in basket weaving.
(I agree with your main point - law school admissions selects for completely "gameable" things).
this article is about hiring, not compensation. inside one firm, there's no evidence compensation is linked to which college you went to.
> how insanely easy it is to game this system if you've the knack for standardized exam
this is irrelevant.
1. no one is hiring just looking at resumes. this is just the screen. they have 500 resumes to look at; they're going to pick some sort of screening system.
2. let's say you got into Harvard Law on your LSAT but you're otherwise lazy and stupid; they'll figure that out based on your interview and your lack of other accomplishments. school is just a screener. they're still going to look at the rest of your resume and ask you questions in the interview.
[T]hey differentiated being a varsity college athlete, preferably one that was also a national or Olympic champion, versus playing intramurals; having traveled the globe with a world-renowned orchestra as opposed to playing with a school chamber group; and having reached the summit of Everest or Kilimanjaro versus recreational hiking. The former activities were evidence of "true accomplishment" and dedication, whereas the latter were described as things that "anyone could do."
This seems perfectly reasonable to me. Almost all of the "top achievers" I know also demonstrate exceptional talent in a completely different field.
Agreed, but I take exception to Everest and Kilimanjaro being put in the same bucket. Climbing Kilimanjaro is evidence of: appetite for travel; willingness to take on challenges; reasonable fitness; good will power. ~10,000 people do it each year. It's probably two or three sigma off Olympic / Everest standard - not that Everest is the pinnacle..
"Google's hiring guidelines explicitly stated that we should only add people smarter than we were. That's why we started running a line on the homepage that said, 'You're brilliant. We're hiring.'...
Larry and Urs were willing to waste a few hundred million impressions to reach the dozen or so people they might consider hiring...
The page at the other end of the link had been written entirely by Jeff Dean[1]"
-From "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee #59" by Douglas Edwards (July 2011)
The recruiting funnel isn't supposed to be perfect. In fact, most of these 'elite firms' know that their recruiting funnels bring in, essentially, statistical noise. And that's just fine.
Your chances for being hired at an elite firm are roughly .5-1%, or roughly 1 hire per 100-200 applications. No filtering system in the world could accurately filter that many candidates in a reasonable amount of time. As it stands, using the highly flawed criteria we use, it still is an enormous drag on the firm to do hiring.
The criteria used - 'elite' school, impressive extracurriculars, good grades - were selected because of their performance in a quality-time trade off. Your choice in reading resumes is to do a good job with 90% accuracy at 15-20 minutes per resume vs a quick filter with 30% accuracy at 1-2 minutes per resume. With hundreds of applications to read through, which would you prefer?
Also, to build on that. There was a time I did some grading of short essays. When I first started doing that I read through all the stuff very attentively and tried understanding everything. As time went on I later was able to get a good feel for quality and could tell if something was going to be good or not pretty efficiently.
It may seem unfair, but really, over time you acquire a pretty good filter. There are probably similarities with reading through resumes. You become familiar with gauging a resume reasonably well with a few seconds or minutes of reading through them --after you've read through enough of them. It's repetition and pattern recognition, in a way.
200 * 20 minutes = 40 hours. @ 500$/hour your only up to 20,000$ which suggests you expect to waste 20k from picking the wrong person. But, the reality is the first year is just a long interview and if you don't get the bonus you where fairly cheap labor (relative to the market).
All the time I see networking having the best value over time when it comes to hiring. Meritocracy only looks good on paper, reality is completely different. Good grades and interesting hobbies? They say - fuck that noise. Firms simply wont take a chance with you if they got someone 'familiar' waiting in line. Get over it and exploit it.
The article lines up with my experience helping screen / hire graduates on to the technical program of a large US based investment bank in London. Only graduates from a handful of Universities in England (and the Republic of Ireland) were considered. These were not limited to the elite engineering schools (Imperial, Cambridge, etc.) however. They did not ask for academic transcripts etc., but only on the final grade (or "class" in the UK).
The most interesting thing I found was that the technical interview did not really matter as much as other interviews and group exercises. I think this made sense since we were hiring candidates straight from University.
Almost no-one uses transcripts for graduate recruiting in the UK.
There's also quite a bit of variation between how banks hire graduates in london. Some such as KBC have very hard-core testing, some like barcap use psychometric style programming questions, while some use mostly "soft testing".
Isn't the process a bit different when it comes to hiring geeks? Being a good software developer for example is a quite measurable and comparable skill. I think the extracurriculars that indicate social skills such as organising charity events etc, would be more relevant if you're a manager or a consultant; but if you are a developer or a mathematician, would people mind a bookworm?
ah! Finally! Clear evidence of a meritocracy at work! </snark>
Actually, in all seriousness, doesn't this suggest there's a real imbalance or opportunity here to be exploited? Companies that hire like this surely must have some other systemic blind spots, no?
The question is how you organically build up to take on the banks and consultantocracies. Their ecosystem is about as far from a competitive market as you can imagine.
Their hiring practices might seem illogical, but I would disagree. They're just not hiring for what you think they are. It's fundamentally about hiring people who have a lot of cultural capital coupled with a work ethic and an above-average-but-not-spectacular amount of intelligence. This has only a weak correlation at best with ability to allocate capital, manage, or "consult." (Those latter skills are genuinely rare, valuable, and hard to identify anyways, so they're increasingly being replaced by organizational and technical solutions.)
Why that group of people? The types of organizations we're talking about are successful because they have secured a privileged place in the network of our economic and political economies. Their target hiring group is people who are consciously or subconsciously supportive of that existing network and will be effective at using and extending it.
So, if you had to name a group of people who are generally content with the status quo, familiar with the world of the rich and powerful, hard-working, and smart-enough, who would you go for? People who graduated from an Ivy League and have access to the resources to spend on things like climbing Mt. Everest or winning an Olympic gold medal in lacrosse.
Only if there are significant talent differences. If everyone who went to Harvard already has the same base level of talent necessary to be a success, then you might as well pick random grads (which is basically what the surveyed peoples' methodologies boil down to) because the remaining variation isn't worth measuring.
Yup their stregths are also their weaknesses. Big opportunity for a contrarian to go in and do the exact opposite of one or more of their hiring strategies.
Avoid the elite schools completely and radically cut the cost of acquiring talent (with presumably less competition for said talent). Pick out promising talent that may have been overlooked by lack of pedigree. Pick out outliers with unconvential ideas. Increase the diversity of personalities and backgrounds to increase the odds of radically new ideas. Ignore grades and come up with your own methods for testing candidates.
To be fair, many trading firms and hedge funds don't recruit this way at all. There was the brainteaser phase, but it's pretty quickly falling out of fashion...
I'm not really sure what the use of "Elite" in this context means; these consulting/banking jobs pay pretty well and are reasonably low risk and allow young ambitious people a means towards bigger and better things, but I don't think most people here would think of these as higher EV than what you'd find pursuing competitive positions in a lot of other sectors.
Everyone works like this, perceptions are virtually indistinguishable from reality. Lawyers, Investment Banks and Consultancies can be gamed by going to the right school. The startup ecosystem can be gamed by committing to the right open source projects. It's just as important that you wear a good suit to meet with MBA types as it is that you wear the appropriate t-shirt and jeans to meet with hacker types.
You really don't see any difference between guessing the value of a lawyer by unrelated extracurriculars and guessing the value of a developer by work on relevant open source projects?
You should look at the first comment. Not 'everyone works like this', some fields can do perfectly meritocratic hiring. (Heck, nothing says that the subjects of the survey couldn't do hiring a little more systematically and not completely ad hoc.)
I have noticed these discussions rarely revolve around what real economic problems are being solved by these individuals at elite firms. This is in sharp contrast to the startup world. I like to say the entrepreneurship is just like a job interview, except your interviewers are your customers and they're grilling you every day.
The more people we have who can perform under that pressure the better our economy will be.
I suspect that this doesn't hold nearly as much in high tech as it does in other fields like banking or law.
For starters, the "top" programs in engineering and computer science is shuffled pretty heavily - Caltech, MIT, and Stanford are in there, but so are Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois, Washington, etc... These are all serious institutions, of course, and of course by national standards even the huge public ones are selective. But I've also noticed (this is just my own experience) that top "tech" companies considerably less concerned with whether you went to a "top" school in the first place.
I wonder why this is - I mean, I'm glad for it. I have a few theories.
The typical techie degree programss (math, physics, computer science, engineering) are so rigorous that people tend to respect the accomplishment (as long as it comes from a recognizable school with integrity).
Tech is a fundamentally creative field, rather than a positional - in other words, techies have the opportunity to create wealth rather than position themselves for a slice of the pie. If you can create wealth, well, get out there and do it! No permission is required.
On a similar note, high tech is extremely disruptive - time and again, tech founders overthrow the established order. These disruptive people often do come from Stanford or Harvard, but I think the personality type of someone who seeks to disrupt the ruling elite is going to be more open to top talent regardless of where it comes from (unlike investment banking or law firms, where (according to the article) graduates of super-elite schools are likely to filter out people who haven't attended a similar school).
Also - high tech tends to have a closer, more symbiotic relationship with academics than investment banking or even law. So high tech will place a greater premium on degrees from universities where top research in engineering and science takes place - not so much out of snobbery as because they have a close connection with these universities and get to know the students there. Interestingly, this doesn't correlate all that well with eliteness of undergraduate admissions (the ivy league, in particular, is surprisingly MIA where it comes to top graduate and or faculty departments in engineering and science... Cornell, which isn't high in the ivy pecking order, is probably one of the best).
Also required reading is "Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy" by Duncan Kennedy (Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School).
As a former associate at a "white shoe" law firm and having been part of the recruiting/interviewing process, I can vouch for most of the observations the article makes.
The Process:
1) HR (and the hiring partner + his helpers) looks through the piles of resumes and decides who to interview or give a full-day callback
Aside: Many top law schools have job fairs where students bid on law firms to interview with and law firms have to accept interviews with those students who bid highest. The schools set this up so that low-GPA students can still get interviews and hopefully impress the interviewer with his/her passion/personality. Surprisingly, this can work out quite well in many instances for the low-GPA students, so long as the stretch isn't too big. Law firms agree to these terms or otherwise, schools deny them access to the job fair. Maybe the recent economic turmoil has changed the dynamic, but I'm not sure.
2) The initial interview (at a job fair or otherwise) is just one person who interviews you and decides whether or not to give you the opportunity for a full-day callback interview on site.
3) On site, there are usually 3-4 one-on-one interviews with a mix of partners and mid to senior level associates. Then its a lunch interview (at a high-end restaurant) with a couple of junior associates.
Any one of the aforementioned people can kill the interviewee's chances with a strong "No", though there are always exceptions when a partner has strong feelings the other way.
From my experience and talking with partners and associates, the only real criteria interviewers tend to consider:
(i) "Gut feel" - meaning whether you like the interviewee and view him/her as an enthusiastic likeable person (remember that you'll likely have to spend lots of late nights working with this person),
(ii) School/grades - knowing how everyone in the legal industry knows how important law school pedigree is in the profession, someone making it into top law schools is considered a huge indicator. Even young associates are very congnizant of law school because we know how hard we tried to get into the top schools because we knew how important it was (much much more important than for undergrad). And don't forget that this is a prestigious law firm with lots of white-haired conservative Yale and Harvard old men.
[Note: This will often have a hard/soft cutoff which will reject an applicant no matter how great the personality or extracurricular]
iii) Exceptional extracurriculars/interests - only things that really make an applicant memorable are worth anything because anyone with half a brain can come up with a list of activities/interests.
iv) Physical attractiveness for women - given that senior management in the legal profession is still dominated by men and that the most attractive women generally don't end up being lawyers, I think this can sometimes come into play (and lets not pretend that it doesn't in the rest of the world).
Meh. That's a bad definition of "elite" if you ask me; those aren't the most interesting jobs or companies. Entry-level "white shoe" law positions are horrible, and junior-level investment banking is an atrocity. If that's what they're calling "elite firms", then their standards are low. Those careers are miserable for the first 5 years-- unless proof-reading pitch books at 3:00 am on a Sunday is your thing.
Worth noting is that these firms go after mediocre Ivy graduates. The 3.8 CS majors are overqualified (except for quant positions). It's not about intelligence. It's only somewhat about social status. Mostly, it's about the people they're trying to hire: status-hungry kids with an unconditional work ethic. These people make bad hires in technology (unimaginative, egotistical) but are great junior I-bankers because they'll do whatever is put in front of them, even if it's the most awful work in ridiculous volume, for the sake of prestige.
What is the profile of the 25th-percentile (as opposed to 50th or 75th) Ivy Leaguer? Someone who's not especially smart, but loaded up on trophy extracurriculars and averaged a 3:30 bedtime during high school on account of perfectionism and overcommitment. For investment banking, that's the ideal hire for a junior position.
> Worth noting is that these firms go after mediocre Ivy graduates.
The banks typically hire around the top 1/3 at Ivies, even higher these days given the economy. My friend, a 3.9 physics major at H/Y/P chose banking over research, and so did a lot of his similarly well-qualified classmates. Hard to turn down a job where your starting pay is about what a mid-career researcher with a PhD makes.
While I agree that those may not be the most interesting jobs, I am curious what you are basing your various assertions on.
>> Worth noting is that these firms go after mediocre Ivy graduates.
Is your definition of mediocre "those who would want jobs like this" and/or "those who would be bad hires in technology"?
>> What is the profile of the 25th-percentile (as opposed to 50th or 75th) Ivy Leaguer?
What leads you to believe that these firms hire the 25th percentile Ivy leaguer?
I worked in consulting for 2 years, and I have since come to believe that startups and other technology companies are more interesting and rewarding places to work. However, dismissing the people who go to work at those places as mediocre, not particularly intelligent drones seems like more of the same HN animosity towards "business types."
[+] [-] 2arrs2ells|14 years ago|reply
i.e. if you can't figure out a way to work the system to get into a top school and get a > 3.5 GPA, you're not going to be able to navigate client politics on a consulting project. Similarly, if you can find a way to make yourself seem really interesting on your resume, you'll probably be able to present yourself in a polished way to a VP at your bank.
If you're a hacker who doesn't want to "play the game" (i.e. you skip college, or go to a state university for free), it's likely that you're not going to be a good fit for these kinds of big firms.
[+] [-] gambler|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Confusion|14 years ago|reply
/sarcasm
[+] [-] kapilkale|14 years ago|reply
I used to look through thousands of resumes at east coast Ivies. I'd basically throw away anything that had under a 3.3 GPA or a 1350 SAT, unless there was something completely out-of-this-league in the extracurriculars.
The issue is the same one that YC faces. There are too many applicants for these positions, and not enough time to adequately evaluate them. So if there's some sort of red flag on the application, the expected probability of making a hire after the interview is lower and it just doesn't make sense to interview when there are better resumes available.
It's like playing texas holdem. In heads up, a king-two has over a 50% chance of winning. But when there are 10 other hands, you don't want to take the risk of someone having an Ace. Similarly, there are lots of winning candidates out there, but there isn't enough time to interview them all.
If I could go back and re-engineer the process, I'd use far more statistics. I'm certain there would be something programmatic that would figure out a way to do it right.
I'd be willing to bet that in the next 15 years someone is going to go Billy Beane on Bain McK and BCG, pick up the talent that seems to be falling in between the cracks, apply technology to the consulting process, and make a killing.
[+] [-] gvb|14 years ago|reply
https://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-cred...
[+] [-] gxs|14 years ago|reply
How does someone in your position view a low GPA, say 2.5, considering the applicant had to work full time during school? I mean actually pay the bills waiting tables work, not 5 hours a week at a dentists office. (Also, a difficult major, say math at a top though not ivey program)
In this position, what hope if any does an applicant have?
Edit: clarity/typos
[+] [-] michaelochurch|14 years ago|reply
Actually, I think those firms are pretty good at selecting the type of person they want. Sure, the 90th-percentile Penn State grad is much smarter than the 30th-percentile Harvard graduate. For technology, you'd rather have the PSU grad who can code. On the other hand, for McKinsey, the latter is arguably a "better" hire. Why? Because investment banking and management consulting are about image and the ability to sell oneself; being 15 IQ points smarter doesn't do much. Not all Ivy League students are very bright (some are, some aren't) but what can be said of almost every one of them (with their admission to the most selective universities as strong evidence) is that they're good at selling themselves.
[+] [-] rayiner|14 years ago|reply
One thing the article doesn't go into is how insanely easy it is to game this system if you've the knack for standardized exams. The LSAT requires no prior knowledge, and simply tests how quickly you can work with logic in your head. With a 4.0 in basket weaving, and a 175 on the LSAT, you're almost guaranteed admission to Harvard Law with a $160k+bonus job waiting for you at the other end.
[+] [-] 2arrs2ells|14 years ago|reply
(I agree with your main point - law school admissions selects for completely "gameable" things).
[+] [-] andylei|14 years ago|reply
this article is about hiring, not compensation. inside one firm, there's no evidence compensation is linked to which college you went to.
> how insanely easy it is to game this system if you've the knack for standardized exam
this is irrelevant.
1. no one is hiring just looking at resumes. this is just the screen. they have 500 resumes to look at; they're going to pick some sort of screening system.
2. let's say you got into Harvard Law on your LSAT but you're otherwise lazy and stupid; they'll figure that out based on your interview and your lack of other accomplishments. school is just a screener. they're still going to look at the rest of your resume and ask you questions in the interview.
[+] [-] cperciva|14 years ago|reply
This seems perfectly reasonable to me. Almost all of the "top achievers" I know also demonstrate exceptional talent in a completely different field.
[+] [-] microarchitect|14 years ago|reply
I'm not so sure about that. What was Dennis Ritchie's exceptional "other talent"? Sergey Brin? David Patterson? Yale Patt? Linux Torvalds?
[+] [-] tomsaffell|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wallflower|14 years ago|reply
Larry and Urs were willing to waste a few hundred million impressions to reach the dozen or so people they might consider hiring...
The page at the other end of the link had been written entirely by Jeff Dean[1]"
-From "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee #59" by Douglas Edwards (July 2011)
[1] http://labs.google.com/people/jeff/
[+] [-] ryanlchan|14 years ago|reply
Your chances for being hired at an elite firm are roughly .5-1%, or roughly 1 hire per 100-200 applications. No filtering system in the world could accurately filter that many candidates in a reasonable amount of time. As it stands, using the highly flawed criteria we use, it still is an enormous drag on the firm to do hiring.
The criteria used - 'elite' school, impressive extracurriculars, good grades - were selected because of their performance in a quality-time trade off. Your choice in reading resumes is to do a good job with 90% accuracy at 15-20 minutes per resume vs a quick filter with 30% accuracy at 1-2 minutes per resume. With hundreds of applications to read through, which would you prefer?
[+] [-] mc32|14 years ago|reply
It may seem unfair, but really, over time you acquire a pretty good filter. There are probably similarities with reading through resumes. You become familiar with gauging a resume reasonably well with a few seconds or minutes of reading through them --after you've read through enough of them. It's repetition and pattern recognition, in a way.
[+] [-] onemoreact|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ofca|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rluhar|14 years ago|reply
The most interesting thing I found was that the technical interview did not really matter as much as other interviews and group exercises. I think this made sense since we were hiring candidates straight from University.
[+] [-] ig1|14 years ago|reply
There's also quite a bit of variation between how banks hire graduates in london. Some such as KBC have very hard-core testing, some like barcap use psychometric style programming questions, while some use mostly "soft testing".
[+] [-] irpap|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captainaj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seigenblues|14 years ago|reply
Actually, in all seriousness, doesn't this suggest there's a real imbalance or opportunity here to be exploited? Companies that hire like this surely must have some other systemic blind spots, no?
[+] [-] scarmig|14 years ago|reply
Their hiring practices might seem illogical, but I would disagree. They're just not hiring for what you think they are. It's fundamentally about hiring people who have a lot of cultural capital coupled with a work ethic and an above-average-but-not-spectacular amount of intelligence. This has only a weak correlation at best with ability to allocate capital, manage, or "consult." (Those latter skills are genuinely rare, valuable, and hard to identify anyways, so they're increasingly being replaced by organizational and technical solutions.)
Why that group of people? The types of organizations we're talking about are successful because they have secured a privileged place in the network of our economic and political economies. Their target hiring group is people who are consciously or subconsciously supportive of that existing network and will be effective at using and extending it.
So, if you had to name a group of people who are generally content with the status quo, familiar with the world of the rich and powerful, hard-working, and smart-enough, who would you go for? People who graduated from an Ivy League and have access to the resources to spend on things like climbing Mt. Everest or winning an Olympic gold medal in lacrosse.
[+] [-] gwern|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexhawket|14 years ago|reply
Avoid the elite schools completely and radically cut the cost of acquiring talent (with presumably less competition for said talent). Pick out promising talent that may have been overlooked by lack of pedigree. Pick out outliers with unconvential ideas. Increase the diversity of personalities and backgrounds to increase the odds of radically new ideas. Ignore grades and come up with your own methods for testing candidates.
Many possibilities.
[+] [-] danielharan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danenania|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radikalus|14 years ago|reply
I'm not really sure what the use of "Elite" in this context means; these consulting/banking jobs pay pretty well and are reasonably low risk and allow young ambitious people a means towards bigger and better things, but I don't think most people here would think of these as higher EV than what you'd find pursuing competitive positions in a lot of other sectors.
[+] [-] fleitz|14 years ago|reply
Merit, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
[+] [-] krakensden|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwern|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tryitnow|14 years ago|reply
The more people we have who can perform under that pressure the better our economy will be.
[+] [-] geebee|14 years ago|reply
For starters, the "top" programs in engineering and computer science is shuffled pretty heavily - Caltech, MIT, and Stanford are in there, but so are Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois, Washington, etc... These are all serious institutions, of course, and of course by national standards even the huge public ones are selective. But I've also noticed (this is just my own experience) that top "tech" companies considerably less concerned with whether you went to a "top" school in the first place.
I wonder why this is - I mean, I'm glad for it. I have a few theories.
The typical techie degree programss (math, physics, computer science, engineering) are so rigorous that people tend to respect the accomplishment (as long as it comes from a recognizable school with integrity).
Tech is a fundamentally creative field, rather than a positional - in other words, techies have the opportunity to create wealth rather than position themselves for a slice of the pie. If you can create wealth, well, get out there and do it! No permission is required.
On a similar note, high tech is extremely disruptive - time and again, tech founders overthrow the established order. These disruptive people often do come from Stanford or Harvard, but I think the personality type of someone who seeks to disrupt the ruling elite is going to be more open to top talent regardless of where it comes from (unlike investment banking or law firms, where (according to the article) graduates of super-elite schools are likely to filter out people who haven't attended a similar school).
Also - high tech tends to have a closer, more symbiotic relationship with academics than investment banking or even law. So high tech will place a greater premium on degrees from universities where top research in engineering and science takes place - not so much out of snobbery as because they have a close connection with these universities and get to know the students there. Interestingly, this doesn't correlate all that well with eliteness of undergraduate admissions (the ivy league, in particular, is surprisingly MIA where it comes to top graduate and or faculty departments in engineering and science... Cornell, which isn't high in the ivy pecking order, is probably one of the best).
[+] [-] calibraxis|14 years ago|reply
(http://duncankennedy.net/documents/Legal%20Education%20as%20...)
[+] [-] alexanderberman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] skrebbel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daimyoyo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vsl2|14 years ago|reply
The Process:
1) HR (and the hiring partner + his helpers) looks through the piles of resumes and decides who to interview or give a full-day callback
Aside: Many top law schools have job fairs where students bid on law firms to interview with and law firms have to accept interviews with those students who bid highest. The schools set this up so that low-GPA students can still get interviews and hopefully impress the interviewer with his/her passion/personality. Surprisingly, this can work out quite well in many instances for the low-GPA students, so long as the stretch isn't too big. Law firms agree to these terms or otherwise, schools deny them access to the job fair. Maybe the recent economic turmoil has changed the dynamic, but I'm not sure.
2) The initial interview (at a job fair or otherwise) is just one person who interviews you and decides whether or not to give you the opportunity for a full-day callback interview on site.
3) On site, there are usually 3-4 one-on-one interviews with a mix of partners and mid to senior level associates. Then its a lunch interview (at a high-end restaurant) with a couple of junior associates.
Any one of the aforementioned people can kill the interviewee's chances with a strong "No", though there are always exceptions when a partner has strong feelings the other way.
From my experience and talking with partners and associates, the only real criteria interviewers tend to consider:
(i) "Gut feel" - meaning whether you like the interviewee and view him/her as an enthusiastic likeable person (remember that you'll likely have to spend lots of late nights working with this person),
(ii) School/grades - knowing how everyone in the legal industry knows how important law school pedigree is in the profession, someone making it into top law schools is considered a huge indicator. Even young associates are very congnizant of law school because we know how hard we tried to get into the top schools because we knew how important it was (much much more important than for undergrad). And don't forget that this is a prestigious law firm with lots of white-haired conservative Yale and Harvard old men.
[Note: This will often have a hard/soft cutoff which will reject an applicant no matter how great the personality or extracurricular]
iii) Exceptional extracurriculars/interests - only things that really make an applicant memorable are worth anything because anyone with half a brain can come up with a list of activities/interests.
iv) Physical attractiveness for women - given that senior management in the legal profession is still dominated by men and that the most attractive women generally don't end up being lawyers, I think this can sometimes come into play (and lets not pretend that it doesn't in the rest of the world).
[+] [-] michaelochurch|14 years ago|reply
Worth noting is that these firms go after mediocre Ivy graduates. The 3.8 CS majors are overqualified (except for quant positions). It's not about intelligence. It's only somewhat about social status. Mostly, it's about the people they're trying to hire: status-hungry kids with an unconditional work ethic. These people make bad hires in technology (unimaginative, egotistical) but are great junior I-bankers because they'll do whatever is put in front of them, even if it's the most awful work in ridiculous volume, for the sake of prestige.
What is the profile of the 25th-percentile (as opposed to 50th or 75th) Ivy Leaguer? Someone who's not especially smart, but loaded up on trophy extracurriculars and averaged a 3:30 bedtime during high school on account of perfectionism and overcommitment. For investment banking, that's the ideal hire for a junior position.
[+] [-] rayiner|14 years ago|reply
The banks typically hire around the top 1/3 at Ivies, even higher these days given the economy. My friend, a 3.9 physics major at H/Y/P chose banking over research, and so did a lot of his similarly well-qualified classmates. Hard to turn down a job where your starting pay is about what a mid-career researcher with a PhD makes.
[+] [-] gmichnikov|14 years ago|reply
>> Worth noting is that these firms go after mediocre Ivy graduates.
Is your definition of mediocre "those who would want jobs like this" and/or "those who would be bad hires in technology"?
>> What is the profile of the 25th-percentile (as opposed to 50th or 75th) Ivy Leaguer?
What leads you to believe that these firms hire the 25th percentile Ivy leaguer?
I worked in consulting for 2 years, and I have since come to believe that startups and other technology companies are more interesting and rewarding places to work. However, dismissing the people who go to work at those places as mediocre, not particularly intelligent drones seems like more of the same HN animosity towards "business types."
[+] [-] jessriedel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] brown9-2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itmag|14 years ago|reply
Elite for me means interesting, impactful work in a free, relaxed setting where I get to grow my skills and put cool projects under my belt.
[+] [-] pitt1980|14 years ago|reply