Elite Colleges Are Back at the Top of the List For Company Recruiters (msn.com)
- Reference: 0180528667
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/06/1814242/elite-colleges-are-back-at-the-top-of-the-list-for-company-recruiters
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/elite-colleges-are-back-at-the-top-of-the-list-for-company-recruiters/ar-AA1TzuPM
Diversity as a priority for school recruiting selection dropped to 31% of employers surveyed in 2025, down from nearly 60% in 2022. GE Appliances once sent recruiters on one or two passes through 45 to 50 schools each year; now the company attends four or five events per semester at just 15 universities, including Purdue and Auburn. McKinsey, the consulting firm that expanded recruitment well beyond the Ivy League after George Floyd's murder, recently removed language from its career page that said "We hire people, not degrees." The firm now hosts in-person events at a shortlist of about 20 core schools, including Vanderbilt and Notre Dame.
Most companies now recruit at up to 30 American colleges out of about 4,000, said William Chichester III, who has directed entry-level recruiting at Target and Peloton. For students outside elite schools or those located near company headquarters? "God help you," he said.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/elite-colleges-are-back-at-the-top-of-the-list-for-company-recruiters/ar-AA1TzuPM
Concurrent with a hiring slowdown (Score:2)
Anyone surprised? Anyone?
No Paper, Thank God! (Score:2)
The good news is that all this is done with electrons and magnetic fields. If we still used paper, like in the old days, there wouldn't be a tree left in site.
reading between the lines... (Score:1)
unless you go to an elite university or one located near headquarters college probably isn't worth attending given the skyrocketing costs of it. it goes up by 4% per year and employment continues to tighten. wtf are we to do just given the lopsided economics of it all? maybe do a trade or something if you're not going to one of those ultra-selective places. there seems to be no safe career path anymore that doesn't start with one of these elite institutions.
Re: (Score:2)
> WTF are we to do ...
That's what war is for: With more people chasing a dwindling resource (middle-class pay-cheque), war is inevitable even though winner-takes-all capitalism has eliminated most of the middle-class (who would pay for that war).
War has useful side effects: Reducing the number of people and their rights (mostly democracy), normalizing theft (of foreign wealth) and creating new customers (the foreigners just robbed), while increasing the wealth of ruling class, yet again.
Civil war is worse because there isn
AI Reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
This was an inevitability, and not just because of the tightening job market. The real gasoline dumped on the tire-fire of employment (especially tech employment) in the United States is AI. It used to be that, when I posed a job opening, I got maybe 100 applications over the course of a few weeks from people who moderately embellished their resumes. And that's because the conventional wisdom was to spend the time to put together a really class-A application to the jobs that were the best fit for you.
But AI has changed the math.
Now the hours-long process of fine-tuning your resume to fit a job description and crafting a nice cover letter to go with it are the work of a click or two. Candidates have every reason in the world to apply to as many jobs as they can. It's a classic prisoners dilemma; sure, everyone else is worse off if the HR departments are flooded but if everyone else does it and you don't, you're never going to land a job.
And so the firehose opens and the job ad that used to get me 100 resumes over the course of a month gets me 1,000 resumes over the course of an hour.
And, just for funsies, most of them are wildly unqualified. AI is happy to lie on your resume for you and getting it not to do that is hard . So now not only do I have a ton of resumes to go through, I have a crisis of trust on my hands. Who, out of all of these applicants, are telling the truth and who's basically echoing the job-ad back to me?
In that situation, it makes a ton of sense to lean back on trust relationships. Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc have reputations to uphold. I can count on them to police their candidates. My local university wants to maintain a good relationship with area businesses; if their graduates are BSing me in their resumes I can meet the head of their career center for coffee and get them to deal with it.
There is no solution here. The employment market is a feedback loop. The bigger the applicant:job ratio grows the harder it is for employers to adequately consider and respond to applications, turning the application process into something more akin to a lottery ticket than a proper application. The more converting an application to a job feels like random chance the more incentivized applicants are to prioritize quantity over quality, driving the ratio ever higher.
Nothing short of a sudden and profound cratering of the unemployment rate is going to slow this arms race. This isn't the end state of the market; it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Re: (Score:2)
This is what I've been seeing as well. I recently learned of a clever trick to help with the screening. Make a very easy programming question for a lead off but bury a hidden symbol in it that will change the result if someone copy pastes it into an AI. Apparently this is good enough to eliminate about half of the candidate pool.
Even better, get involved with local universities. Most programs have a capstone course or senior project of some kind and plenty are looking for industry involvement. It's a gre