Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.interviewing.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 496 posts

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

#171

Post by jakelarkin »

KeepTalking wrote: post #69

This is true not just for engineering hires. I recently experienced this with more evolved roles such as PM and PMMs. Diversity and inclusion biases go beyond educational background. I have noticed the big tech firms (experienced this with a social network giant) are more biased to hire from a big consulting firm like McKinsey or Bain. Despite having the requisite experience & education for the role, I got the boiler…

PM and PMM at big companies are effectively middle-management. Business manager hiring leans toward the trajectory you describe because 1) its the largest, traditional low-volatility career path for top performers out of good schools 2) it ensures the candidate has passed through a number of relatively rigorous admission filters on pedigree, culture, diligence and performance, and 3) at successful large companies the senior managers/execs are mostly MBA grads and they themselves are biased to hiring younger versions of themselves as reports.

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

#172

Post by jsonne »

I guess I'm just speaking for myself here, but it's depressing that according to many folks in this thread my life path was essentially decided for me by the time I was 18. That being said this is far from the first time I've heard this argument, and largely a reason I decided to get into entrepreneurship. I didn't have the pedigree, my parents went to an even worse state school than I did, and my family largely had no industry connections. If I'm going to jump classes I'll have to do it of largely my own merit. Luckily the public at large doesn't care if a Harvard grad or a state school grad built the company/product they love.

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

#173

Post by Consultant32452 »

gumby wrote: post #146
Consultant32452 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

They are matching the diversity of the schools' recruiting efforts. So yes, you could say they are (perhaps) unbiased vs their input, but their input has problems. In other words, their selection of schools to recruit from means they are outsourcing the distribution of your their candidate pool, and the GP poster is not happy with that aspect of the result. If it doesn't match your society or customer base, and you t…

I'm not disagreeing that the situation is bad. I just don't see how adding bias to your recruitment is a solution to the problem. If we had a bunch of women who couldn't get engineering jobs I'd understand, but we seem to have the opposite situation where everyone is competing for a limited resource. If you're proportionate to the pool, you're probably doing well.

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

#174

Post by mseebach »

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…

> In my circle of friends, there were 3-4 other people that Google would have been lucky to have

Don't they have a referral bonus scheme pretty much exactly for this?

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

#175

Post by wolco »

unethical_ban wrote: post #32
Avshalom wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are advocating hiring from the big 5 and then saying that it's just a coincidence that all the employees they've hired on 'on [their] own merit' are from there.

FYI OP posted alongside you in their own words. What I got from it is "No shit Harvard is better than UPhoenix South Campus" but if we came up with a good way to measure skills and learning capacity independent of rote programming quizzes/etc., hiring from a lower tier school would be less risky. I know someone who dropped out and is now making plenty of money at a software development gig. I also know CS grads who c…

Harvard is no MIT. One generally goes to harvard because they are rich vs smart. You may be surprised by the quality of UPhoenix grads. One has to be motivated to be a UPhoenix grad while other things are more important at Harvard.

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

#176

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #173
gumby wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are matching the diversity of the schools' recruiting efforts. So yes, you could say they are (perhaps) unbiased vs their input, but their input has problems. In other words, their selection of schools to recruit from means they are outsourcing the distribution of your their candidate pool, and the GP poster is not happy with that aspect of the result. If it doesn't match your society or customer base, and you t…

I'm not disagreeing that the situation is bad. I just don't see how adding bias to your recruitment is a solution to the problem. If we had a bunch of women who couldn't get engineering jobs I'd understand, but we seem to have the opposite situation where everyone is competing for a limited resource. If you're proportionate to the pool, you're probably doing well.

> I just don't see how adding bias to your recruitment is a solution to the problem

The goal isn't to add bias. It's to seek out the source of a bias we think might exist and then remove it.

For example, if we find 5% of top-tier schools' CS grads are women while 20% of mid-tier schools' CS grads are, and find similar quality in both pools (keep in mind, when you interview graduates you get to select for quality), then it makes sense to recruit from both pools. By excluding the latter pool, even if not for discriminatory reasons, we're implicitly biasing our inputs.

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

#177

Post by robotresearcher »

dangerlibrary wrote: post #151
skybrian wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Google interviewer definitely shouldn't be doing that. Sounds like you got a bad one.

Based on the other comments here, it sounds like he got a thoroughly average one.

But they hired the recruiter from a top school!

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

#179

Post by DavidHm »

wolco wrote: post #158
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…

Why give special treatment to a big firm over smaller firms?

If you can host X companies over the course of a semester / year, then selecting large, well-know, well-paying companies maximizes the total salary of all students you are able to place in these companies

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

#180

Post by camus2 »

drraid0 wrote: post #56

What if I don't care about "diversity" as measured by the number of "underrepresented" minorities, and instead care about the fiduciary responsibility I have to maximize value for stock holders?

> What if I don't care about "diversity" as measured by the number of "underrepresented" minorities, and instead care about the fiduciary responsibility I have to maximize value for stock holders?

What if I told you that diversity hires were paid significantly less? Do you really think all that Silicon Valley PR is out of the goodness of the heart?

Post reply on HN