<p>What I took from the article is not that Google et al. don’t hire applicants from top colleges–just that a brand name alone does not give them an edge. The whole point of the article is to explain Google’s investigation into the attributes of the employees who have been successful over the long term. Academic pedigree does not appear to be one of those factors.</p>
<p>no no no Sally305 I was not intending to make that correlation at all. And “top flight” was the wording google put in the ads that I recall from that time, not my words either. I just think it so funny they sound so holier than though about the way they recruit NOW and that some of this turnaround is very recent. Of course being flexible and refining you practices is a positive trait. dd went to a large state school for grad school where google has an office she worked in one summer. As a matter of note, you see google offices in a lot of college towns aside from HQ and they do have employees and interns from those nearby colleges:</p>
<p>Mountain View, Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Austin, Boulder, Boston, Detroit, Irvine, Kirkland, Los Angeles, Madison, New York, Pittsburgh, Reston, San Francisco, Seattle, DC</p>
<p>I only know three people at Google. One is a lawyer - undergrad U of Chicago, law at Stanford. The other two are on the coding end of things. One went to U of Chicago as an undergrad, the other to Carnegie-Mellon. Both of them had internships at Google before being hired.</p>
<p>My recollection for my son was that his name was given to them by classmates who worked there, and that there was a series of interviews and tests before they hired him as an intern.</p>
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I suspect the author of the article is neglecting a key piece of information in his summary. Perhaps Upstart is only including the minority of students who are getting backed by Upstart, for which most less selective colleges do not have a significant sample size. I say this because LinkedIn and other sources report very different numbers. For example, San Jose State reported the following employers had the most hires for their 11-12 grads:
- Cisco (headquarters in Silicon Valley)
- KPMG (has division in Silicon Valley)
- Yahoo (headquartersin Silicon Valley)
…
The list continues with nearly all of the dozens of companies that hire a large number of San Jose State grads being located and/or having divisions in Silicon Valley. The number of grads from the top company list make up the majority of the participants in the SJS grad survey, and nearly all of the top hiring companies have divisions in Silicon Valley, yet some how 97+% of grads from SJS do not work in Silicon valley, so it doesn’t make the top 10 in this secondhand summary of Upstart’s report?</p>
<p>I think they care–a lot. But they’ll take some wild cards too just to keep other voices on staff too.</p>