Firm 'hides' university when recruits apply

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-34384668

by tankenmate • 11 years ago

73 54 11 years ago

bbc.co.uk

afarrell• 11 years ago

This has been proposed as a way to fight rising college costs http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies...

jostmey• 11 years ago

This graph says everything you need to know about higher education: http://www.businessinsider.com/inflation-update-2011-1

I would suggest that academia is in a bubble, but many of the top Universities are sitting on massive endowments. They have a nearly endless supply of cash.

nugget• 11 years ago

Top universities are benefiting from globalization the same way that real estate owners in global cities are...there is an almost endless demand for their product. If all qualified high schoolers from around the world could participate in an auction to win a spot in Harvard or MIT's incoming class, the annual tuition would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. But this only applies to a small cluster of top schools and it drops off pretty quickly.

phkahler• 11 years ago

Government involvement in student loans is the direct cause of that.

bdamm• 11 years ago

Are you saying governments shouldn't create policy that allows student loans?

MichaelGG• 11 years ago

Are they doing this just for social aspects? The article doesn't cite any hard reason why they'd do this. You'd think that with so many applicants and positions, they'd have lots of data that'd let them know if university attended is a good predictor of performance.

As well as the opposite: If folks of different background really "innovate differently", then again, they should have the data to prove this. Like "while Xs only make up 5% of our workforce, 15% of all good-whatevers come from them".

Or at least, they should investigate after this experiment is tried out and determine if it had real impact.

michaelt• 11 years ago

  You'd think that with so many applicants
  and positions, they'd have lots of data

It's easy to gather data about whether the hires you made were good hires.

It's difficult to gather data about whether the rejections you made were good rejections.

cusackalex• 11 years ago

huge reflection of the commoditization of education. Essentially the only thing they're checking for now is 'did you go to college?' The top 10-20 schools will continue to standout, but outside of the 'name brands' the education is perceived as all being on the same level

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

Who's to say the top 20 schools are really that good, though? They're on top thanks to arbitrary, 'commodity' rankings.

cottonseed• 11 years ago

I've about to hire and I've been thinking trying to build a process that blinds to as much as possible: gender, race, age, university, previous employers. What else? If you're doing this, please get in touch, I'd like to talk about how you go about it.

eplanit• 11 years ago

Being blind to gender, age, and race make perfect sense -- but not University or Employer history. I would want to know if my applicant succeeded at a challenging vs. mediocre school, and if their previous employer was at all relevant in the industry. People can often present themselves well, but their history might reflect inconsistencies.

jlg232• 11 years ago

Picture, name, address and family situation.

The term for that process is "anonymized application" in German speaking countries. In Switzerland they made good experiences with that (German article: http://www.3sat.de/page/?source=/nano/gesellschaft/149883/in...).

In my opinion, the best way to ensure that you are "blinded" properly: Find someone from a minority who is conscious of the obstacles people from minorities face. Tell that person "I'm a racist, misogynist, idiot full of prejudices. Make sure I can only hire based on qualification." Have that person screen all applications and black out all revealing information. This could be a perfect short-term gig for a 2nd year student in a relevant field (relevant to the social aspects of the hiring process, not the positions you hire for).

PS: Explicitly listing the things you do not want in an application in the job post will probably help out weed people who cannot even follow simple instructions ;)

sokoloff• 11 years ago

Why wouldn't such a person that you hired ONLY pass along resumes of minorities (or edit and sabotage the resumes of the majority candidates)? After all, you've hand-picked them to be someone conscious of the struggles AND told them that you're racist, misogynistic, prejudiced, and an idiot...

supernova87a2• 11 years ago

Interesting sentiment and maybe well intentioned. But regardless of whether you like it or not, the university provides a strong filtering mechanism on the quality of your applicants. It is highly correlated with successful application. So they may try this, but quickly back off at having got rid of a very highly correlated screening input.

miander• 11 years ago

This is the premise they are betting against. "Quality" is not a one-dimensional value, and a team full of Ivy League graduates are going to have similar biases and weaknesses that could hard a team. I think that's what the focus is shifting towards.

6d0debc0712• 11 years ago

It is highly correlated with successful application.

Almost axiomatically so if you make it a hiring criteria. The real question is whether it's correlated with good KPIs, (and the secondary question of whether your KPIs express your business needs.)

supernova87a2• 11 years ago

It can be, so you have to guard against it.

But what is for certain is that anyone attempting to follow this example will be flooded by applications of lower qualification in general -- making it difficult for any small sized company to deal with.

Just imagine if you had to conduct the search for applicants with a 10x larger pool of candidates. The sheer work involved is sure to cause problems of their own nature. Balance that against how much you really need to find diversity.

flashman• 11 years ago

"Having attended a specific university" isn't as strong a predictor of performance as you might think. Even "having attended university" isn't a particularly strong filtering mechanism, as E&Y recently dropping the degree threshold shows: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ernst-and-young-dr...

gambiter2• 11 years ago

As an aside, it's funny that both articles use the same stock image.

gambiter2• 11 years ago

Granted, it's anecdotal, but I've personally seen university graduates that seemingly aren't capable of reading basic instructions or submitting a useful CV. Conversely, I've seen applicants with zero university who wowed during the interview, and went on to wow everyone as a very skilled employee.

I think the 'filtering mechanism' you speak of is vastly overrated, and I'm excited to see things like this happening. People should be hired based on ability and skill, not a piece of paper that they somehow acquired.

roymurdock• 11 years ago

10 days ago EY drops the 2:1 degree requirement [1] for UK applicants...now Deloitte feels the need to one up them by removing college branding from the consideration altogether. Next up is PWC rejecting any applicant with a college degree and poaching them right out of high school instead :)

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ernst-and-young-dr...

knight173• 11 years ago

PwC, and other Big 4 and even small accounting firms in the UK already have a school leavers program.

You join the firms out of school, they will ask you to register with ICAEW/ACCA and study to become a chartered accountant (CPA in the US), the firm will provide you with books, exam fees and tuition fees while you earn on the job. After three years while your peers finishing up at university you will have a solid work history with great qualifications with no debt. You can even get a degree if you join ACCA for just ₤200 for submitting a thesis and no additional exams.

While in the US, to become a CPA, you would need masters level education in most cases to even appear for the CPA exams. UK and almost all commonwealth countries have programs and institutes that offer professional qualification opportunities with even more prestige than the average university route. Accountancy is one of the few fields where one can get-qualified-on-job in the Anglosphere (US, Canada excluded).

ICAEW : http://careers.icaew.com/school-students-leavers

ACCA : http://www.accaglobal.com/uk/en/qualifications/accountancy-c...

ACCA + B.Sc (Hons.) :http://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/help/oxford-brookes.html

pcr0• 11 years ago

While in the US, to become a CPA, you would need masters level education in most cases to even appear for the CPA exams.

Source? This sounds ludicrous.

nl2• 11 years ago

Note that this is the BBC, and applies to Deloitte UK. It is unclear if it applies to Deloitte worldwide.

The university system in the UK is completely different to in the US, so hypotheses around it being to do with the cost of university or student loans need substantial adjustments to make sense in the UK context.

cgtyoder• 11 years ago

Can you say more about the differences? I don't know what they would be at all - I thought they were very similar.

rahimnathwani• 11 years ago

1) Many degrees are 3 years rather than 4.

2) Tuition fees for UK/EU students are capped at 9k GBP (13.6k USD) per year.

irl_zebra• 11 years ago

School: *

Extracurriculars: Staff Writer for the Harvard Crimson; Summer Internship with Professor David Malan CS50

chrischen• 11 years ago

Harvard Crimson will be come the new Harvard.

arethuza• 11 years ago

In the UK I can imagine non-Oxbridge Universities having "Oxford Clubs" for people who applied but didn't get into Oxford... (and Cambridge clubs as well - membership would presumably be mutually exclusive).

NB even 20 years ago there were clubs that solely seemed to exist so that the members could rotate the top job between them so they could all have "President of the XYZ Club" on their CVs.

bloat• 11 years ago

OK, so maybe it won't work for graduate CVs. For anyone else, surely you just list your university and your degree.

Edit: Ah. Just noticed the article is talking about graduates.

Qwertious• 11 years ago

School: *

Extracurriculars: Staff Writer for the * [Newspaper]; Summer Internship with * Professor

kqr2• 11 years ago

I wonder if a form of Gresham's Law (bad money drives out good) [1] may come into play. Basically if all university diplomas are effectively considered equal, then candidates from top tier schools will instead apply to places where they perceive their diploma carries more weight. In other words, if we think of a diploma as a form of currency, candidates will prefer to spend it at a place where it is valued more highly.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law

tpeo• 11 years ago

Not Gresham's Law per se, as it is specific of money. But what you're describing is essentially a form of adverse selection (see Akerlof's "Market for Lemons"). If employers lower their wage offers below the reservation wage of graduates from prestigious schools, then they would leave the "undifferentiated" job market.

But there might be more to it. Graduates from better schools might still accept job offers if they could hope to get a raise once their true value is discovered.

wpietri2• 11 years ago

I cannot think of a happier outcome than companies who value fancy credentials over effectiveness ending up with the employees who would be upset that they're being evaluated on how they actually perform rather than the prestige of their degree. Then I'd never have to work with anybody like that again.

beachstartup• 11 years ago

aka proxies, something the elite are very good at

emmab• 11 years ago

Why is half the article in quotes?

dang2• 11 years ago

It must be quoting from some source that isn't linked. If anyone can find it, we might change the URL to it. HN generally prefers original sources.

masterzora• 11 years ago

The article appears to be based on this press release: http://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/press-releases/articles...

grumio• 11 years ago

For that matter, why is "hides" quoted in the title? I thought it was sarcastic or something.

c3534l• 11 years ago

This is interesting as an accounting student. The big 4 audit firms which hire the bulk or entry-level accountants have traditionally played favorites with schools. This comes as quite a surprise to me because they haven't really shown any effort otherwise about not picking favorite schools. Although this is across the pond, so maybe it'll be different in the US.

harryc2011• 11 years ago

They seem to focus their campus recruitment events (http://www.deloitte.co.uk/aem/student-events-calendar.cfm) heavily towards the Russell Group universities (Oxbridge, London, Durham etc.) If they want a more diverse talent pool, why don't they hold more events further afield?

Firm 'hides' university when recruits apply

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