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I think that's a bit of an uncharitable reading. He anticipates a similar objection with, "You’d lose out on entry level talent! Maybe, or maybe part of your o

I think that's a bit of an uncharitable reading. He anticipates a similar objection with, "You’d lose out on entry level talent! Maybe, or maybe part of your operations would be getting to know college kids." (Emphasis mine.) What I took away from the article is that he's suggesting that your company find other ways of developing relationships with outside people, rather than putting out a call for strangers to line up and jump through hoops when they need to hire someone. Another example: So many companies rely heavily on open source software, but how often do they take the opportunity to form relationships with the people who build and maintain it? When you say, "What would fix the problem is for people to define 'desirable' in different ways, with a bias toward 'the place that I actually ended up at'," that seems to me very much what he is suggesting.

st3v3r 10y ago
While that's possible, I think we all know that most companies would not do it that way.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Also, some companies do do it that way and are widely decried as elitist for it. I went to a pretty elite school, and every fall, companies like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Monitor Group, Bain Capital, etc. would descend upon campus. They'd build relationships with professors, ask about who the top students in classes were, and oftentimes arrange private dinners with those students to get to know them. Rumor on campus was that if you were a top 25% student in the econ department, you had a job waiting for you on Wall Street; if you weren't, well, you had to fight for careers like everyone else. Problem is, "building personal relationships with promising talent" doesn't scale, and so the companies that do it have to pick who the promising talent is. They usually do so through other markers of status (where you went to school, who you know, who your parents are, etc.), which just perpetuates existing inequalities. Everybody thinks that they are the beautiful unique snowflake that hot companies will want to know, but when they find out that those beautiful unique snowflakes are other people, they cry foul. (Interestingly, 3 of the 4 companies mentioned above imploded spectacularly, while companies with noticeably impersonal and impartial application processes - like Google or YCombinator, for example - are still going strong. That might be an indication that the "treat everybody as a cog, but at least treat them fairly" approach tends to work better.)
- mazelife 10y ago
  Well, as I mentioned in another comment, that means that companies that actually bother to reach out to communities they are involved with and cultivate relationships with members may have a competitive advantage. I have no illusions that the MegaCorps of the world are going to change how they do things, but there are companies that don't follow that template out there.

st3v3r 10y ago

While that's possible, I think we all know that most companies would not do it that way.

nostrademons 10y ago
Also, some companies do do it that way and are widely decried as elitist for it. I went to a pretty elite school, and every fall, companies like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Monitor Group, Bain Capital, etc. would descend upon campus. They'd build relationships with professors, ask about who the top students in classes were, and oftentimes arrange private dinners with those students to get to know them. Rumor on campus was that if you were a top 25% student in the econ department, you had a job waiting for you on Wall Street; if you weren't, well, you had to fight for careers like everyone else. Problem is, "building personal relationships with promising talent" doesn't scale, and so the companies that do it have to pick who the promising talent is. They usually do so through other markers of status (where you went to school, who you know, who your parents are, etc.), which just perpetuates existing inequalities. Everybody thinks that they are the beautiful unique snowflake that hot companies will want to know, but when they find out that those beautiful unique snowflakes are other people, they cry foul. (Interestingly, 3 of the 4 companies mentioned above imploded spectacularly, while companies with noticeably impersonal and impartial application processes - like Google or YCombinator, for example - are still going strong. That might be an indication that the "treat everybody as a cog, but at least treat them fairly" approach tends to work better.)
mazelife 10y ago
Well, as I mentioned in another comment, that means that companies that actually bother to reach out to communities they are involved with and cultivate relationships with members may have a competitive advantage. I have no illusions that the MegaCorps of the world are going to change how they do things, but there are companies that don't follow that template out there.