5 ms·

> I wonder if during interviewing, what would happen if interviewers were simply not allowed to know the educational background of the candidate - after all, on

> I wonder if during interviewing, what would happen if interviewers were simply not allowed to know the educational background of the candidate - after all, once they have been admitted for an interview, does that information really matter at all (i.e. in the context of a specific interview?). I've been heavily involved in interviewing, from the hiring side. You are actually correct. From the hiring party's perspective, the cost of interviews is the time of the current employees administering them. The candidate's entire resume is thus taken into account before making the expensive decision to fly them over and have 5-10 people interview them in person. In other words, there certainly is some weight given to a candidate's educational credentials, but it's almost completely limited to the decision whether to interview them at all. Once a candidate is in front of an interviewer, their resume only matters as a jumping point into live discussion, typically of topics like past projects and interests. The brand of their school makes zero difference at this point. > It's hard for younger people to avoid this, and when I did a lot of interviewing in my 20's I think I was too skewed by this, not having the opportunity to know really what all of that meant. The unpleasant truth is that unless you interviewed with some extremely inefficient employers, you were not rejected due to your school brand, but due to your perceived interview performance. Nobody flies a candidate for a full day of interviews just to reject them based on something that was already known. Not every candidate from a top school is smart. There's plenty of terrible candidates from top schools, and they bomb interviews just like everybody else, and when they do they get rejected. Finally, I'd say that nowadays, the benefit of the handful (say top 10) schools is far less obvious. There's plenty of "2nd-tier" engineering schools that will easily get you into most interviewing processes.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
"The brand of their school makes zero difference at this point." "unless you interviewed with some extremely inefficient employers, you were not rejected due to your school brand, but due to your perceived interview performance." I disagree with this point (and FYI I don't think I've been rejected due to this). I strongly believe that the word like 'Harvard' biases perceptions right from the start of the interview. As do appearance, culture, possible demarcations of political orientation. I believe that even at a supposedly imminently professional place as Google ... that the same person interviewing with a 'thick southern accent' who enjoyed 'hunting and fishing' would have more difficulty than otherwise. Tech is generally a little better than other fields because it's a little easier to intelligently discriminate between good and bad ... but in my view it's problem. I totally agree that 'school' is a reason to 'fly them out' - but I also believe that if you did not allow interviewers to see the resumes ... that'd you get different results.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > I strongly believe that the word like 'Harvard' biases perceptions right from the start of the interview. As do appearance, culture, possible demarcations of political orientation. I'm only really familiar with engineering interviews, but for those, in the past decade and especially recently, most of these factors are irrelevant. The trend since at least 2005 has been ever more strongly favoring real, quantifiable, comparable, job-related challenges. Most everything else is a distraction, which interviewers are trained to ignore. This was a result of scientific studies of the older interview paradigms, which indeed suffered from some of the biases you mentioned and were - for these and other reasons - inefficient at predicting good job performance. This is doubly true for intellectual work like engineering, where quirky folk (including those who have poor appearance, not much interest in non-geeky culture, etc.) are common and often the best candidates. Bottom line: performance is measured and quantified on well-defined tasks, the rest is largely fluff, unless the candidate is being a blatant jerk or something of that extreme nature. > I believe that even at a supposedly imminently professional place as Google ... that the same person interviewing with a 'thick southern accent' who enjoyed 'hunting and fishing' would have more difficulty than otherwise. Do you have any data or evidence to back this up? I'm inclined to believe that someone like that would, if anything, stand out if they performed well on the technical part. They'll be the "CS genius hillbilly". That's another thing you're missing: the main challenges provide such a strong and salient signal of performance, that the rest of the data is largely interpreted in light of that performance. That goes for school brand too, by the way. If a candidate from MIT does very badly, the reaction is not "let's forgive him, he's from MIT" but rather "for someone who got accepted and graduated MIT, this guy sure did underperform" and a prompt rejection. > I totally agree that 'school' is a reason to 'fly them out' School brand alone will not get you a plane ticket. It might get you a phone screen. There's too many bomb candidates from top schools to just freely shower them all with plane tickets. By the way, I agree with the claims made in the article. With top schools like Harvard giving legacy candidates 6 times chances of admission, you're going to have a lot of Harvard students who got there because their parents did, and/or their grandparents before them, etc. That means a lot of bomb candidates from even the very, very best schools. Hiring businesses are aware of this. The brand power of these top schools therefore falls short of what you seem to believe. Sure, you can get a phone screen with a Harvard degree. But you can get the very same one with an NYU degree too. And once you do, it doesn't matter that you're "only from NYU".
forapurpose 8y ago
According to research I've read about; many leading businesses only hire from elite schools, with few exceptions. For example, here's this article from The Atlantic (which includes a few other factors): Recruitment, Resumes, Interviews: How the Hiring Process Favors Elites For those who didn't go to prestigious schools, don't come from money, and aren't interested in sports and booze—it's near impossible to gain access to the best paying jobs. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/recruitment-resumes-interviews-how-the-hiring-process-favors-elites/394166/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/recruit...
- dunpeal 8y ago
  First of all, notice that none of this contradicts my comment. A prestigious school brand will help you to get into the hiring process. I did hear that for certain roles in certain companies, such prestigious brand is effectively a requirement to enter the process. This is rare in software engineering, because there's so much demand, that even the top tier employers can't limit themselves to top school graduates, not if they want to fill up all openings. The other reason is that these top schools churn out a lot of legacy graduates - people who got in and graduated because their parents attended the school and/or donated money. That means there's a lot of top school graduates who aren't that bright, and many of the brightest people who went to less prestigious schools.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

"The brand of their school makes zero difference at this point." "unless you interviewed with some extremely inefficient employers, you were not rejected due to your school brand, but due to your perceived interview performance." I disagree with this point (and FYI I don't think I've been rejected due to this). I strongly believe that the word like 'Harvard' biases perceptions right from the start of the interview. As do appearance, culture, possible demarcations of political orientation. I believe that even at a supposedly imminently professional place as Google ... that the same person interviewing with a 'thick southern accent' who enjoyed 'hunting and fishing' would have more difficulty than otherwise. Tech is generally a little better than other fields because it's a little easier to intelligently discriminate between good and bad ... but in my view it's problem. I totally agree that 'school' is a reason to 'fly them out' - but I also believe that if you did not allow interviewers to see the resumes ... that'd you get different results.

dunpeal 8y ago
> I strongly believe that the word like 'Harvard' biases perceptions right from the start of the interview. As do appearance, culture, possible demarcations of political orientation. I'm only really familiar with engineering interviews, but for those, in the past decade and especially recently, most of these factors are irrelevant. The trend since at least 2005 has been ever more strongly favoring real, quantifiable, comparable, job-related challenges. Most everything else is a distraction, which interviewers are trained to ignore. This was a result of scientific studies of the older interview paradigms, which indeed suffered from some of the biases you mentioned and were - for these and other reasons - inefficient at predicting good job performance. This is doubly true for intellectual work like engineering, where quirky folk (including those who have poor appearance, not much interest in non-geeky culture, etc.) are common and often the best candidates. Bottom line: performance is measured and quantified on well-defined tasks, the rest is largely fluff, unless the candidate is being a blatant jerk or something of that extreme nature. > I believe that even at a supposedly imminently professional place as Google ... that the same person interviewing with a 'thick southern accent' who enjoyed 'hunting and fishing' would have more difficulty than otherwise. Do you have any data or evidence to back this up? I'm inclined to believe that someone like that would, if anything, stand out if they performed well on the technical part. They'll be the "CS genius hillbilly". That's another thing you're missing: the main challenges provide such a strong and salient signal of performance, that the rest of the data is largely interpreted in light of that performance. That goes for school brand too, by the way. If a candidate from MIT does very badly, the reaction is not "let's forgive him, he's from MIT" but rather "for someone who got accepted and graduated MIT, this guy sure did underperform" and a prompt rejection. > I totally agree that 'school' is a reason to 'fly them out' School brand alone will not get you a plane ticket. It might get you a phone screen. There's too many bomb candidates from top schools to just freely shower them all with plane tickets. By the way, I agree with the claims made in the article. With top schools like Harvard giving legacy candidates 6 times chances of admission, you're going to have a lot of Harvard students who got there because their parents did, and/or their grandparents before them, etc. That means a lot of bomb candidates from even the very, very best schools. Hiring businesses are aware of this. The brand power of these top schools therefore falls short of what you seem to believe. Sure, you can get a phone screen with a Harvard degree. But you can get the very same one with an NYU degree too. And once you do, it doesn't matter that you're "only from NYU".

forapurpose 8y ago

According to research I've read about; many leading businesses only hire from elite schools, with few exceptions. For example, here's this article from The Atlantic (which includes a few other factors): Recruitment, Resumes, Interviews: How the Hiring Process Favors Elites For those who didn't go to prestigious schools, don't come from money, and aren't interested in sports and booze—it's near impossible to gain access to the best paying jobs. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/recruitment-resumes-interviews-how-the-hiring-process-favors-elites/394166/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/recruit...

dunpeal 8y ago
First of all, notice that none of this contradicts my comment. A prestigious school brand will help you to get into the hiring process. I did hear that for certain roles in certain companies, such prestigious brand is effectively a requirement to enter the process. This is rare in software engineering, because there's so much demand, that even the top tier employers can't limit themselves to top school graduates, not if they want to fill up all openings. The other reason is that these top schools churn out a lot of legacy graduates - people who got in and graduated because their parents attended the school and/or donated money. That means there's a lot of top school graduates who aren't that bright, and many of the brightest people who went to less prestigious schools.