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If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

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Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#121

Post by andreaferretti »

drewg123 wrote: post #37

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…

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

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#122

Post by sidlls »

notyourday wrote: post #57
wlesieutre wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument is that if you're hiring a student from Stanford you can assume some baseline level of competence (only approximately true, I'd bet). If you're hiring from elsewhere, maybe you have to interview 10 people to find someone with similar knowledge/skill/misc. It's a bigger time investment in the hiring search, and gauging technical skill in a job interview is still an unsolved problem. If you find an efficie…

You are building a CRUD application. You need him or her being +7 on 0 to +100 scale. You are saying that you only start at those who are +70.

Forget CRUD applications. Most of the work at most companies, including the usual Big Ones, simply isn't that complicated for anyone with just about any technical degree. On your scale most of it, almost all of it, tops out at like 50-60.

These companies set the bar at 70+ for a number of reasons. Their own egos ("I only work with 'the best' so therefore I'm also 'the best' and don't want to water that down"), status signalling for the companies, to keep bright young talent from starting a competitor, etc.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#123

Post by jroseattle »

When we find a candidate we're interested in pursuing, we ask our recruiting operation to do two things prior to sending us the candidate's resume.

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.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#124

Post by kafkaesq »

w1ntermute wrote: post #5

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…

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.

So your implication is that the ratio of "competent" : "completely incompetent" for students coming from these schools is roughly... 2:100?

I know you can't possibly mean that. But your language clearly implies that ratio. The only question is why you're making such a bizarre implication.

I often find that those who are so keen on “hiring broadly” have never worked in a company that hires primarily from Podunk State

Was the original article suggesting that your company hire "primarily" from Podunk State? Or simply that you probably don't want to hire near-exclusively from the Top 5?

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.

Which is exactly what the original article was advocating - a "completely blind, skills-first approach". In particular, it was definitely not arguing that one should "focus extra" on state schools.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#125

Post by gaius »

southphillyman wrote: post #105

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…

The secret of elite colleges is to only admit those who would succeed anyway, then take the credit. In the UK Oxford very heavily favours privately educated students from well-connected families for example.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#126

Post by strictnein »

andreaferretti wrote: post #121
drewg123 wrote: post #37

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…

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

I don't know what UB is (I'm assuming it's a university).

BS = Bachelor of Science

MS = Master's of Science

HR = Human Resources

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#127

Post by [deleted] »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #115
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #94

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. The…

>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?

[deleted]

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#128

Post by logfromblammo »

gonehome wrote: post #112
drewg123 wrote: post #37

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…

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 ab…

I didn't get in to MIT, but if I had, it's unlikely I would have attended, due to financial reasons. I went to a state school, and had a handful of scholarships to help me out.

In retrospect, I would have been better off applying to UIUC, Purdue, or CMU, but quite a lot of the decisions I made when young would have turned out differently if I knew then what I know now.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#129

Post by mjevans »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #94

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. The…

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.

Re: If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

#130

Post by humanrebar »

crispyambulance wrote: post #42
naturalgradient wrote: post #10

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…

> How could companies reach the great students at unknown schools systematically? Maybe it's better that these great students at "unknown schools" DON'T get hired by google/facebook/amazon/microsoft ? Maybe their talents are best directed at small-ish companies where they can contribute, grow, and do interesting stuff outside of monstrously large companies with cut-throat competition? Having ALL the "top" candidates…

> Having ALL the "top" candidates vacuumed up by the "top" employers just seems wrong to me.

In my experience, "top" employers are employers that pay the best. I'd probably be happier at a small and scrappy company, but they so far have offered worse compensation.

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