Observations from interviewing recent college graduates

blossom
Fri, 25 Nov 2016 15:29:51 +0000

Ixnay- it’s ludicrous to say “shame on” well known firms for their cavalier attitude.

You simply don’t know what the hiring criteria are at any given company, and you have no idea what templates they use to get to the answer (i.e. the right number of hires around the world to fill both immediate needs and long term development/progression goals).

Recruiting isn’t random. Companies aren’t throwing resumes against a wall and seeing what sticks and what falls down. DE Shaw looks for different things than Morgan Stanley which looks for different things than Bridgewater. A kid may do exceptionally well in a DE Shaw interview and bomb at Bridgewater. That doesn’t mean that Bridgewater is stupid and DE Shaw is smart- it means that they look for different things, and that the people who develop hiring models for each company have tailored the process to fit the end result.

Companies spend millions of dollars recruiting, training, and retaining successful employees. It’s not a random process to assemble your class every year. Do they “miss out” on talented kids by not interviewing more widely? Of course. But my shareholders don’t pay me to be a social worker and “spread the wealth” across an ever-widening pool of colleges- they pay me to get high potential employees with a wide range of skills in the right places around the world in the most efficient way possible while still obeying the law, hitting our diversity targets, and ensuring that the “next big thing” (which we don’t even know about yet) will get covered by hiring enough “out of the box” thinkers who can look around corners and imagine the future.

What you see as a cavalier attitude is a company’s cost-effective way of whittling down the field.