[rayiner]

School is a filter you apply before you take the effort to figure out whether someone is a "good candidate." The uphill battle for people from no-name schools is to give hiring managers an alternative reason to put in that effort.

That seems to be exactly what this kid did. He knew he wouldn't get past the hiring filter, so he went out of his way to make a contact in real life and then follow up with an eye-catching e-mail.

[goatforce5]

I can see that if you were getting dozens or hundreds of applications for a role you'd have to be pretty brutal about who to cut before you even spoke to them.

I've never had that luxury, though. Any job i've been involved with advertising has had trouble attracting many applicants at all.

[rayiner]

Goldman receives about 10,000 job applications per year (disproportionately for junior analysts). McKinsey receives about 100,000 per year.

[FireBeyond]

"McKinsey receives about 100,000 per year."

Citation? That's highly dubious.

There are 111.5M adults in the US between age 22 and 55.

Of those, 64.9% are considered "participating" in the labor force. That brings us to 72.4M. Of those, 61% are considered "blue collar", i.e. manual labor. It's fairly safe to assume McKinsey isn't attracting that subset.

We're now down at 28M. Without further subdivision, I'm fairly comfortable in feeling skeptical that one in every 280 white collar workers in the US applies for a job with McKinsey every year.

[cellis]

You're making some gross assumptions. Firstly:

"in the US"

There are a lot more people, you know, elsewhere. Further, applicants typically take a scattershot approach, and apply to hundred to thousands of companies in their course of finding employment.

100,000/365 = 273/day. You don't think the most reknowned consultancy in the world can garner that?

Second you assume that only white collar workers will apply to McKinsey.