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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

#291

Post by soniawalker234 »

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

#292

Post by Tehchops »

sndean wrote: post #164
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…

> Career services at non-top tier schools are shit. Doing my undergrad and PhD at an average large state school, I was really lucky to get an internship (and now job), essentially by word of mouth and my PhD advisor. Now that I'm doing a part-time Masters at an elite-ish (top 10) school, I'm realizing how amazing career services can be. They send out weekly emails saying: "James Dimon is coming to speak." "Dir. of En…

> I'm realizing how amazing career services can be. They send out weekly emails saying: "James Dimon is coming to speak."

Interesting, and I can see it. But then again, I have to wonder if there is some degree of confirmation bias at play here?

It's likely the staff in Career Services at $ivyLeague are, on average, of a higher skill than their counterparts at $stateSchool. But by how much? Sending an email isn't exactly a massive technical accomplishment, and even being able to send an email saying Mr. Dimon is coming to speak might say a lot more about the name of the school they work for than it does their ability as administrators.

A school like Harvard has a lot more clout in name, money, and connections, in getting someone like Dimon, Blankfein, Zuckerberg etc... to speak(or even pick up the phone) than, say, New Mexico State University.

It may be organizational skills and capability, but I'm willing to bet it's also about name recognition, alumni connections, and availability of resources.

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

#293

Post by vita17 »

jroseattle wrote: post #123

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 diff…

If you're only considering local candidates aren't you still filtering out most universities just indirectly?

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

#294

Post by UncreativeCodar »

wpietri wrote: post #237
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…

I happened to chat recently with some people from the startup Handshake: https://www.joinhandshake.com/ It's founded by 3 graduates of Michigan Tech University, a small but well-regarded school that even other Michiganders think is far north. Their goal is to level the playing field for internships and first jobs. It was great to meet people so sincere about solving this problem.

Thats an admirable goal. I hope it continues to be developed, my experience so far is that it's just a less functional LinkedIn clone.

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

#295

Post by jroseattle »

vita17 wrote: post #293
jroseattle wrote: post #123

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 diff…

If you're only considering local candidates aren't you still filtering out most universities just indirectly?

The local-candidate attribute is for logistics, not filtering.

We consider candidates both local as well as national/remote. The local-candidate attribute tells us if someone is around/nearby for onsite interview planning. (National/remote requires more planning, obviously.)

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

#296

Post by vita17 »

As a senior at a public university who couldn't afford to go anywhere else but made the most of his opportunities earning a good GPA, participating in clubs, going to hackathons, working in research, learning extracurricular subjects, etc. this topic is devastating.

I've done my best to learn the skills that companies think I should have when I graduate. But it appears many companies will reject me because of who I am not because of what I've done or what I can do if given the opportunity.

Maybe I lack some skills that you only find in candidates from the top universities. It's not from a lack of effort. Why not advertise what those skills are and give everyone an opportunity to learn them and demonstrate them?

Why play this game where you pretend I am some enemy trying to infiltrate your company with ignorance?

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

#297

Post by tomtang0514 »

nnd wrote: post #155
eropple wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). Agreed--I was accepted everywhere I applied save one and I ended up going to the University of Maine. I've never hurt for work and I paid off my student loans by the age of 25. Google sniffs around now (aside: rec…

From my personal experience, Google recruiters appear to range from absolutely horrible to incredible, so are the interviewers.

I second this, but most google recruiters are pretty terrible. Some are so disrespectful that I have to tell someone to put my profile into google blacklist so they don't bother me anymore.

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

#298

Post by mypalmike »

eastWestMath wrote: post #283
kobeya wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the top schools prepare their candidates for the test. I think I’m a pretty decent coder, thank you very much, but I suck on those blackboard interviews. I could see that being fixed with practice though, and maybe the big schools format their classes and labs such as to practice for that?

Every professor I know who’s involved with programming contests is pretty open that it’s about passing programming tests.

Companies too realize that the process is a highly imperfect proxy for overall developer capability.

But it's also infinitely better from the company's perspective than having no data whatsoever on each candidate's current capabilities.

Combine this with the fact that false negatives (good programmers who perform poorly on 45-minute blackboard programming tests) are not a measurable problem for a company, and you end up with what we now have.

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

#299

Post by tomtang0514 »

kobeya wrote: post #266
mypalmike wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. When I pushed a bit at (well-known tech company), I managed to get a couple of high-GPA CS students from my state university into the internship interview pipeline. These students were personally recommended to me by the school's top (IMO) CS professor. I was particularly excited for one of them, who had a 3.9-something GPA, and who seemed pretty solid technically when I spoke with him on the phone. Unfo…

Or the top schools prepare their candidates for the test. I think I’m a pretty decent coder, thank you very much, but I suck on those blackboard interviews. I could see that being fixed with practice though, and maybe the big schools format their classes and labs such as to practice for that?

I graduated from a top 5 CS program, and no we don't do that.

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

#300

Post by hexane360 »

gonehome wrote: post #205
CWuestefeld wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). One exception at least. One of my fraternity brothers at RPI came to beautiful Troy, NY when he had the option of MIT. There really are good reasons for such a choice. The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those eli…

> The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those elite professors doing research, and that comes at the expense of teaching. There's no guarantee that the less selective schools are any better at teaching. From what I've seen CMU and Stanford both had smaller class sizes and better teachers than RPI, but that was just from quick touring. There are some sc…

The Wall Street Journal had an article a while ago where they tried to find schools with great research as well as teaching.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-great-research-meets-grea...

Can't get behind the paywall now, but it was a lot in line with your arguments.

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