[ryguytilidie]

I've recruited for Google, Facebook and NASA. It just blows my mind that people STILL filter based on school. I got admitted to a bunch of great schools and stayed close to home because my mom was ill. Does this make me not worth hiring? There are millions of people in semi-unique situations that kept them from attending an Ivy League school. I don't get why someone would want to eliminate tons of potentially great people.

[rayiner]

Banks and consulting firms are in a somewhat unusual situation. They get 10,000 applicants for ~100 analyst positions, but even after they hire an analyst they're really just rolling the dice to find the ~10 (or whatever) of those that are going to be managing director or partner material. The rest will be pushed out after a certain number of years.

So what they do is operate on the following principle: not all smart people go to Harvard, but most people who go to Harvard are smart. They're not worried about missing out on candidates that are "worth hiring" because they have many more such candidates than they have open spots. What they want is a practical sorting mechanism that maximizes the number of potential stars in each analyst class.

[tzs]

It's a probability thing. For instance, suppose 90% of great people go to great schools. Suppose only 20% of non-great people go to great schools. Suppose only 1% of people are great. (Just making up numbers, as the exact numbers don't matter to illustrate the point. All that matters is that great people have a significant tendency to go to great schools, and that there are a lot more non-great people than great people).

Then a random candidate from a great school will have a 4.3% chance of being great, whereas a random candidate from a non-great school will only have a 0.13% chance of being great.

If you have a ton of resumes, and only time to examine, say, 1000 of them, pulling at random from a pool that mixes those from great and non-great schools will give you a pile with about 9 great candidates (8 from great schools, 1 from a non-great school).

If you tell HR to filter out the non-great schools, and then look at 1000 resumes from just the great schools, you'll have around 43 great candidates.

[mindcrime]

Yeah, same here. Look at it as a blessing though... it means that their competitors can snag great people by not applying such arbitrary filters. Hell, that's probably one reason startups can attract awesome people who didn't get scooped up by Goldman Sachs or whoever.