I have a friend at Booth who attended a well-known party school in Arizona (use your imagination) for his undergraduate degree. During a first-round interview with a prestigious investment bank, he was told not once, but twice, that he would be working with “mostly Ivy League colleagues.” The recruiter was concerned that my friend, with his poolside college background, might not mesh with the blue bloods. My buddy gritted his teeth through the rest of the conversation and checked the company off his list.
Notwithstanding the over-the-top snobbery of this interviewer, the Ivy League bias is a pervasive one. Recruiters assume that top institutions serve as the best filters for talent and smarts, so many of these candidates are given first dibs on jobs simply because of the Harvard (or Stanford, or Yale, or whatever) name. The brand name also helps the firm in future recruiting or business relationships; “They have employees that went there, so they must be legit.”
What about actual performance in the career world? Don’t the silver spoon kids consistently outperform their plastic spork counterparts?
If they graduate in the top of their class, probably. If they don’t, probably not. The wild-haired disprover-of-everything-we-hold-dear, Malcolm Gladwell, says it’s because of “relative deprivation" theory. This isn’t when you haven’t seen your Grandma in a while. It means that we don’t assess ourselves in relation to everyone in the world, we assess ourselves in relation to those in our immediate social circles (in other words, our classmates). Turns out if you do well in relation to your peers, regardless of your school, you’ll likely do well later in life.
So, practical application time. Should you give up spending considerable time and money recruiting heavily from the best-ranked schools? Depends on which “you” you are.
If you’re Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, continue to do your thing. There’s a well-established culture of alumni hiring soon-to-be alumni, and that’s fine – you’re doing quite well. You also tend to get first dibs on the actual top 1% from those schools, so have at it.
For the 99.9% of the rest of you, the “you” who need people in the trenches cranking out quality work, the “you” who usually have to sift through the big firms’ leftovers, the “you” who should probably value work over status so you can get stuff done and grow your business – you can probably stop wasting your resources. Not only is it harder to grab the attention of the Ivy Leaguers as a less-prestigious firm, it probably won’t result in better practical performance anyway.
Consider this: there is often a stigma surrounding tactical training at top-ranked schools. Topics like “general management” (ugh) are given considerable focus, while subjects like sales training are virtually ignored. And, it’s often merely a reflection of the fact that top tier candidates won’t consider “lower” jobs (some of which are incredibly lucrative). In the spirit of full disclosure and honesty, guess how many sales courses Booth (always ranked as a top 5 business school in the world) offers? Two (one of which was added this year). Now, guess how many DePaul University offers? More than ten. As a growing company where you live or die by sales volume, where would you recruit your sales force? It’s okay, you won’t hurt my feelings.
There’s a hidden and incredibly valuable wellspring of talent just underneath the perceived rankings threshold – people who perform at the top of their respective classes, who have been trained in a tactical manner, and who will actually take a conversation with you (even if you don’t have nice cufflinks). Forget the brand names, broaden your search, and reap the benefits.
…the [traditional job search] really shouldn’t be degree-based or certification-based…it’s trying to figure out how to understand somebody’s school of experience and how they can apply it to what you need them to do today, what they can do for you tomorrow, and how they think…” - HireVue Founder Mark Newman
Brian is a co-founder of PitchFire, a mobile recruiting application that utilizes video elevator pitches to allow candidates to differentiate themselves to the best employers. For more information, visit www.pitchfire.com or reach out to [email protected]
