“No AI or automation will allow them to scale the process confidently. At the top of the funnel may be but even there companies like this see no need for all that incremental effort for very very minor marginal impact.”
You make an excellent point.
Do you know what scales efficiently? Targeting your on-campus recruitment to places which have already screened for you. Is it possible that there is a Swarthmore history grad out there that cannot write a coherent 2 page executive summary by reading and analyzing a 50 page report on “Why our market share in Brazil has declined this year”? Of course it’s possible. But it is much less likely than hiring marketing analysts from rando college down the street, so the odds of a good hire go up and the probability of a bad hire goes down. Yes, even if the “rando college” grad majored in marketing and knows a lot more about “how to calculate market share” than the Swarthmore grad who wrote a research paper on Winston Churchill’s reactions to the invasion of Poland.
As much as folks on CC hate to admit- companies rely on colleges to build a highly scalable and repeatable recruitment model for them. Is there a U Chicago applied math major out there who doesn’t know what a standard deviation is?
I’ve had college grads working for me who don’t know. I had one who was a member of her college’s Honor Society (from a math adjacent field). A data point she trotted out regularly every time her lack of analytical capability became apparent.
Contrary to what you read on CC- companies do not want to boil the ocean when they have a limited number of seats they need to fill. They want to increase the odds of great hires, lower the risk of bad hires, and do so while complying with the law and minimizing their costs.
In the CC fantasy world, middle management is flying around the country hunting for the “diamond in the rough”. And truth be told- these diamonds do exist. But I ran a “diamond mining” campaign for my then-company back in the early 2000’s and we made a not-shocking discovery- these diamonds were not interested in what we had to offer. The top student in physics at a midwestern flagship (not one of the famous ones…) wanted a PhD in physics. The top student in chemistry at that same university was heading to medical school. The top student in math at a different U was in ROTC and was heading to the military with the hopes of doing something cyber related. Etc.
These students don’t lack for opportunity, even if the CC folks think they should be clamoring for jobs in PE or hedge funds. Many of them don’t want to live in Hong Kong, NY or London; many of them didn’t decide to major in physics because they heard it was a shortcut to getting hired at DE Shaw or Citadel. They did it because they love physics.