@blossom it is much harder for Yale, Princeton, Stanford kids to enter top PE straight out of college. The overwhelming majority are Harvard, Wharton kids and top PE firms target fort and foremost these two places. Anyone in the industry will tell you that.
According to linkedin-- and I only had three minutes- I count 5 folks at Bain Capital, in PE, from Princeton, with nothing more than a BA (and one is a Managing Director) and that doesnāt include any other undergrad degree and doesnāt go to pages 2 and 3 of my Linkedin search.
One PE firm.
Penn95- it may help your narrative that you canāt get to PE straight out of college but itās not accurate. Check the recruiting calendars of the non-Wharton undergrad colleges. Why are the PE firms going there to recruit if they are only going to hire from Harvard and Wharton?
It isnāt āmuch harderā. It is hard getting a job in PE from the git-go but it is no harder coming from Yale or Princeton than it is from Wharton or Harvard.
it is āmuch harderā coming from University of New Haven but thatās not what you claimed.
Yea it does, and this is the reason whyā¦because although so many on this site like to think their children are special snowflakes, the fact of the matter is that brilliant kids are a dime a dozen. So what sets the kids apart? Personality, personableness, diligence, all that stuffā¦and LOOKS. Plenty of studies prove this. Looks are half the battle. A good looking young coed will get the job that her more frumpy roommate will not get, even though the roommate on paper is better qualified. Because brightness is not unique, its the intangibles that are applicable. Any bright kid can be replaced with any other bright kid any day of the week.
^^ Coed? Seriously?
^^^if you donāt know the answer to this, you donāt know whats going on out there.
@guyfromflorida I would tend to agree. I can not talk about the STEM people but for industries like business and law, it is absolutely beneficial to be pretty. There is a halo effect around pretty people that cannot be denied. Recruiters are no immune to the effects of beauty.
I would be unemployable in corporate recruiting if I hired ācuteā over competent.
And that goes for my colleagues at the global investment banks, top tier consulting firms, PE firms, and corporations.
Iāve never hired for a law firm so cannot comment- but given the very well documented bias of the top firms for folks who went to a Top 14 law school AND made Law Reviewā¦ and given that T-14 admissions is heavily influenced by LSAT scores, unless you are prepared to argue that ācuteā people do better on standardized tests than non-cuteā¦ Iāve got a bridge to sell you.
There are several career paths where appearance is important. TV news/weather. Pharmaceutical sales (although that has changed somewhat over the last five years). Personal training and almost everything else in the fitness/wellness sector. Hospitality- even backroom roles in hotel, cruise, casino, theme parks.
But elite employers in banking, PE and consulting?
Iād like evidence.
And I can guarantee you that someone who leads recruiting at a large company who hires a āclassā of new grads who cannot perform, or whose retention is lower than historical benchmarks, had better hope he or she has a backup plan. One bad year with a lot of mistakes- you are out. And it doesnāt matter how cute YOU are, or how attractive your hires were. If they donāt perform-- you are out.
@MassDaD68 ā¦Law absolutelyā¦ that I know from my own personal knowledgeā¦Business highly likely too. But even in Stemā¦ since there are so many qualified candidates vying for limited positions out there these days, it is pretty hard to believe that looks will not be very important. I think a pretty young woman has lots of advantages over a less pretty young woman or any guy, although Iām pretty sure that looks are very important on the male side also. This of course may be politically incorrect because we all like to believe that merit is all that is importantā¦ but that is just not accurate.
ā¦ you need to go back and read what I wrote. Brightness and Competence are a dime a dozen. Thatās the whole point. Of course nobody would knowingly hire somebody incompetent just based on looksā¦but at the level we are talking about, they are ALL competent. The truly unique genius will of course be able to write his own ticketā¦ but they are not the normal very bright, talented people we are talking about here. Truly unique genius is of course by definition very, very rare.
Hiring dynamics can change from office to office within the same company. At one firm I worked at, the manager of the downtown office made of point of hiring pretty young single women for the administrative staff. The suburban manager did not, and ended up with an administrative staff that was older, and a mix of married, single and divorced men and women. There was a marked difference in the performance of the two, with the downtown office a much more energetic and enjoyable place to be for the professional staff.
I can tell you from 30 years of experience that cute doesnāt matter in law firm hiring. As proof, I refer you to the websites of the law firm of your choice. Except Davis Polk & Wardwell, which is the hot law firm.
That is just not a thing in law firms. Itās not. Top level lawyers are generally fit and thin, but real attractiveness is not the norm.
Not true at all. Have you seen some of these IB folks? Well dressed, but cute???
You must be good. You must also be able to converse. You must be likeable. You must be presentable. Good looking? No.
@Canuckguy 90% of my success is the ability to explain very complex issues in bite sized pieces to management. They are surrounded by brilliance. But brilliance does them no good unless they can understand it. So your story is so true.
Zoosermom, I know enough about law, even big law, to know that young, attractive women have huge advantagesā¦ but the fact is in big law, women also have disadvantages. Big Law these days is very competitive as you well know, and the guys are simply much more likely than women to tolerate the long hours and some would say abuse and exploitation that comes with the job of being an associate at these firms. Big law recruiters know that women are far more likely to walk out the door much sooner than a guy would, and will also put their relationship with their partners at a higher priority than their job much more than a guy wouldā¦but big law is only a small percentage of the firms out there. At the smaller firms that do not work their associates to death by promising them the potential of lucrative and prestigious partnerships down the road, or a great resume, pretty young women have many advantages. Again, just a fact of life. Iāve seen it over and over. Of course it is also sadly true that older women have more difficulties.
guyfromflorida, thatās just not true. Iāve been doing that job for 30 years. Looks just donāt come into it in the way that you think because thatās not how the process works. It is first and foremost all about the law school. If you donāt come from one of the T14 law schools, you canāt get an interview, no matter what you look like. However, if you are on law review at one of those schools and have a corresponding transcript, you will almost assuredly get an offer somewhere, because itās the same small pool of candidates that interviews among all the top firms. Itās been even worse since the crash, because some (more than a few) firms either openly or not, only hire clerks, which further limits the pool and excludes the variable of appearance. In fact, being really attractive as a woman can hinder prospects at law firms because most of the women arenāt particularly attractive. Now, I will say that candidates who are obese pretty much never get hired. But the rest? No. Absolutely not. And the reason is that the applicant pool is so small that it meshes pretty well with the available jobs in any given year.
Maybe if the positions the tech/engineering firms are hiring for are sales & marketing or other non-technical areas which tend to be regarded within many engineering/tech culturesā¦especially among hardcore old-school engineer/tech folks as dumping grounds for engineering/tech hires who didnāt cut the mustard to qualify working in the core engineering/tech departments which is also where they promote folks into senior firm management/leadership roles.
I also find this a bit dubious.
If weāre talking hiring for those core engineering/tech departments as thereās still a strong culture in many engineering/tech firms/working cultures of regarding someone who puts more than a casual priority of oneās appearance as someone who misplaced priorities and is doing so to compensate for a lack of engineering/tech competence/know-how until proven otherwise(assuming theyāre even hired in the first place).
This culture was manifest in the startups I worked in and only slightly eased up when I worked in the IS department of a financial company.* And the engineering/tech firms which were known for mandating formal dress codes/looking good tended to be wildly reviled and lampooned by many engineering/tech folks at tech conventions or lunch/dinner among colleagues during/after work**.
- One of my interviewers and later supervisor upon telling me I was hired said I was way overdressed with the interview suit and that business casual is the prevailing dress code with those in our department. And this was at a medium-sized Boston area financial firm. Granted, none of us were going to be meeting clients or otherwise the "face" of the firm...but then again we were way too busy with the IS/tech related projects to do so.
** A few supervisors recounted encountering the mandated formal dress code and ālooking goodā for all employees prevalent at IBM when they worked there in the '80s. They all hated it and cited/half-joked that this obsession with āfrivolous superficialitiesā was one of the factors in causing IBMās rapid decline and near-bankruptcy.