Post # 11: “And then people wonder why kids who post are prestige hounds. It can be very confusing.”
I’m not trying to hijack this thread from it’s fine purpose, to assist @girlengineer. However, @austinmshauri foregoing quotation (again) focuses on an important issue, one I believe is highly instructional especially for those in the fifteen to thirty-five age groups.
I don’t believe girlengineer’s experience is either unusual or unexpected. Individuals can debate endlessly – and futilely, there is NO resolution possible – regarding whether it is also fair or unfair. However, we all reside in the “real world,” not on some parallel, flawless planet. Some will suggest that the OP has EARNED – and apparently with fine grades – a fully credible ABET Bachelor’s degree, and that is all that’s relevant. Pragmatically, I am compelled to disagree, based on my own experiences during 40+ years in the workplace (as a naval officer/Lockheed Martin engineer/leader/program manager/executive). The following describes why I feel as I do.
To begin, my thesis is far more applicable to those just receiving Bachelor’s degrees and in their first, perhaps, 10 or 15 years of experience than it is to seasoned professionals – that is significant. Please consider the hiring decision from the relevant manager’s and his (or hers) supervisor’s/director’s viewpoint, because they – not the functionaries in HR – are the individuals who ultimately determine who will be offered this position. These folks are busy, they have many responsibilities, generally they are under considerable pressure to “produce,” and respectively they may oversee probably 1 to 25 and 75 to 200 degreed professionals. Furthermore, personnel issues are frequently a “necessary inconvenience” that impedes their – and their teams – immediate task achievement(s) . . . frankly, they are widely perceived as a “pain.”
Understanding this environment, let’s now consider how job X is actually filled. To begin, X generally has a Position Description, it’s frequently pro-forma in nature, but the manager and the director will BRIEFLY (<5 minutes) review it and possibly make a few modifications. Those enhancements could (although this is not too typical) including wording such as: “with an ABET accredited Bachelor’s degree in Z from a highly reputable university.” They might do so because, candidly, it makes their hiring task easier and less-perilous to rely on the highly-competitive screening already applied by a most-selective university. Next, HR will solicit and receive probably 100+ internal- and external-resumes from aspirants who want job X. HR will initially screen this “pile,” but basically only to eliminate those who clearly do not meet the documented position requirements. Next – and this is where I offer my key point – the manager/director will receive probably 75 to 125 “employable” resumes from HR and they will decide how many individuals will be interviewed. This is the most-critical hurdle in the process, and crucially the manager/director can only afford to spend a minute (possibly two) on each resume. They “weed” this resume stack from possibly one hundred (or more) to about a dozen VERY quickly, and then they consider that group in appreciably greater depth to obtain a list of approximately five or six “interviewees.”
The cut from about 100 to about 10 or 12 resumes is the ESSENTIAL EVALUATION and – vitally – less time was invested in assessing each resume than it takes to walk across the office to refill one’s coffee cup with a few moments of idle chatter included. To do this expeditiously, each resume is “scanned” any any unusual “high or low points” are noted. Any highlight deficiency and the resume is discarded, any clear positive and it enters the “possible interview pile.” Obviously, a BSE from MIT, Cornell, UVa, Berkeley, and so forth “jumps out” in this fast evaluation (as do degrees with excellent grades from “home team” universities: Georgia Tech for Marietta, UCLA/USC for Palmdale, UT, A&M and Texas Tech for Fort Worth, and so forth) , but a BSE from WVU (for example) probably does not. Suggesting that no insightful effort was invested to reduce these resumes from the 100+ pile, to the dozen, and then to the five or six who will be interviewed is self-evident.
The goal here is very important understand: it’s not to spend countless hours investigating and analyzing 100+ resumes, rather it is to find a group of “final candidates,” all of whom are low-risk and have a high probability of success in position X. It truly is irrelevant if five or ten other individuals are fundamentally equal to those who will be interviewed . . . we are not in the HR business and we want – and need – to get back to our “real” jobs, the ones we are where high-level performance is important to overall programmatic success. Our only objective is QUICKLY to cull the resumes and arrive at reasonably-sized, no-risk, almost definitely high-success interview-pool. Those <10 - 12 selected will, finally, be interviewed – and with considerable care and effort, often at least twice – before a final selectee is offered job X.
This is solely one individual’s experiences, but I rather doubt if they differs greatly from the norm in large, engineering/program management-focused, and highly competitive organizations. I provide these details so the OP – and others – can understand why Northwestern is a major interview-catalyst, while Widener is not (and, decisively, you can’t be hired if you are not interviewed). That appears to be the crux of the OP’s inquiry.