[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.