<p>OP- I manage a large team of recruiters for a global company and have been recruiting both mid and senior level execs as well as new grads for most of my career in a variety of organizations.</p>
<p>A couple of thoughts for you:</p>
<p>1- People who hire for a living don’t just throw the dice when developing a recruiting calendar, figuring out how many people to hire for which location, etc. For the most part, the people who help decide how many new grads get hired and where they should get hired from for big organizations have a pretty detailed view of a wide range of colleges and universities. That includes LAC’s. The top LAC’s have a terrific reputation at most of the companies that hire large numbers of new grads every year. </p>
<p>2- Once you leave the very big corporations, banks, media companies, consumer products, insurance companies, consulting firms, etc. this is not necessarily the case. You can be a mid level manager at a small company and be told, “We are launching a new project next year so go hire 5 new analysts” and then be left to your own devices, i.e. your own alumni network, schools you’ve heard of, schools your spouse has heard of, etc.</p>
<p>3- GPA is important. Not as important as some people think (a 3.8 is the same as a 3.9, trust me, so don’t take lame and stupid courses to “protect” your GPA). But the days where a gentleman C at Harvard could trump Phi Beta Kappa at U Michigan are long gone. Don’t obsess about grades to the detriment of getting an education, but don’t think that majoring in beer pong and partying is going to impress any corporate hiring manager. Lots of the kids that we all know who have “failed to launch” and are living on mom’s couch did not do well in college. And the fact that it’s a terrible economy means that the 2.9 GPA in Marketing Management isn’t going to have the world beating a path to the door.</p>
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<li><p>Quality trumps prestige- but not in the way that parents and kids like to hear. Majoring in something that a university does well, and doing well at it, is very important. Patching together your own major in leisure studies at a college that has a phenomenal economics department and then trying to pass yourself off as an econ major because you took three econ classes as a leisure studies major isn’t going to work. Not from Harvard, not from Swarthmore, not from U VA. Go major in econ; write an honors thesis about leisure studies. Or major in Renaissance Art- it doesn’t matter, but do well in it, and don’t spend the next ten years explaining why you couldn’t find a department to study in and had to make up your own.</p></li>
<li><p>Most recruiters and hiring managers have a very broad perspective on the talent pool. My team reads over a hundred thousand resumes every year for positions all over the world. (professional roles- not clerical, hourly, etc.) So the fact that someone down the block from you hasn’t heard of Pomona or doesn’t know what linguistics is shouldn’t worry you too much, unless a kid has very narrow interests which suggests that they’re going to work in one particular region of the country with a narrow set of employment options.</p></li>
<li><p>Don’t flame me… the quality of the Career Services department is more important than the things that people on CC obsess about constantly. Worry less about whether Harvey Mudd produces more PhD’s per capita than Williams; most kids who were good students in HS think they are either going to med school or getting a doctorate. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to look around and realize that most of these kids are wrong. They don’t end up doing that. They end up getting jobs that don’t have MD or PhD attached to them. So for god’s sake- spend an hour investigating the quality of the career development operation since for most of you, that’s where your kid is heading. </p></li>
<li><p>Engineering and other technical professions (actuary, statistics, etc.) have their own rules but all the above still stands. Quality trumps prestige- if I run recruiting for a global manufacturing corporation with a large research facility in the Midwest and I need mechanical engineers then my hiring team is heading to Rolla Missouri. I fish where the fish are biting. </p></li>
<li><p>But prestige is important. Not because it matters if your neighbor has heard of the college, but because prestige is often (not always, but very, very frequently) an excellent proxy for quality. If I’m looking at a resume of a kid from Princeton with a BA in English I’m not going to worry that he will need his boss to edit his emails or two page memos. If I’m looking at a resume of a kid from MIT applying for a business development/strategy job, I don’t need to give her the math/analytical test we give to applicants for some roles.</p></li>
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<p>Yes- it is very, very bad and lazy of us to use college as a sorting device. But the quality of K-12 education in this country is so lousy, and basic skills are in such a pathetic state, that I’d need to hire another 50 recruiters just to apply “holistic assessment” to every resume, and frankly, that’s not a good deal for our shareholders. Better to use a sorting device, as imperfect as it is, and quickly boil down the pile to a manageable number of strong, talented candidates, then waste time and money trying to figure out every whacky major and minor and triple major and GPA scheme that’s out there.</p>
<p>When times are tough- we hire fewer people, and we spend less money doing so. When times are better, we kvetch that it’s a “war for talent” out there and we can’t find what we need and we go to more schools and are more open to thinking about kids from schools we don’t know well. </p>
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<li> Family connections? next to useless. We give courtesy interviews all the time to relatives of “important people”- but they are courtesies. Nobody here would risk their job hiring someone’s idiot nephew. We have anti-nepotism rules anyway which prevent a lot of the old-boy/interfamily stuff… but if you are laboring under the impression that playing tennis in Nantucket with the right people is going to get you hired by a top tier company these days (unless it’s to be a tennis pro) you have not been reading the newspapers.</li>
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