Firm 'hides' university when recruits apply | Hacker News Reader

Firm 'hides' university when recruits apply

bbc.co.uk

73 pointstankenmate54 comments

School: *

Extracurriculars: Staff Writer for the Harvard Crimson; Summer Internship with Professor David Malan CS50

Harvard Crimson will be come the new Harvard.

In the UK I can imagine non-Oxbridge Universities having "Oxford Clubs" for people who applied but didn't get into Oxford... (and Cambridge clubs as well - membership would presumably be mutually exclusive).

NB even 20 years ago there were clubs that solely seemed to exist so that the members could rotate the top job between them so they could all have "President of the XYZ Club" on their CVs.

OK, so maybe it won't work for graduate CVs. For anyone else, surely you just list your university and your degree.

Edit: Ah. Just noticed the article is talking about graduates.

School: *

Extracurriculars: Staff Writer for the * [Newspaper]; Summer Internship with * Professor

I wonder if a form of Gresham's Law (bad money drives out good) [1] may come into play. Basically if all university diplomas are effectively considered equal, then candidates from top tier schools will instead apply to places where they perceive their diploma carries more weight. In other words, if we think of a diploma as a form of currency, candidates will prefer to spend it at a place where it is valued more highly.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law

Not Gresham's Law per se, as it is specific of money. But what you're describing is essentially a form of adverse selection (see Akerlof's "Market for Lemons"). If employers lower their wage offers below the reservation wage of graduates from prestigious schools, then they would leave the "undifferentiated" job market.

But there might be more to it. Graduates from better schools might still accept job offers if they could hope to get a raise once their true value is discovered.

I cannot think of a happier outcome than companies who value fancy credentials over effectiveness ending up with the employees who would be upset that they're being evaluated on how they actually perform rather than the prestige of their degree. Then I'd never have to work with anybody like that again.

aka proxies, something the elite are very good at

This has been proposed as a way to fight rising college costs http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies...

Interesting sentiment and maybe well intentioned. But regardless of whether you like it or not, the university provides a strong filtering mechanism on the quality of your applicants. It is highly correlated with successful application. So they may try this, but quickly back off at having got rid of a very highly correlated screening input.

This is the premise they are betting against. "Quality" is not a one-dimensional value, and a team full of Ivy League graduates are going to have similar biases and weaknesses that could hard a team. I think that's what the focus is shifting towards.

> It is highly correlated with successful application.

Almost axiomatically so if you make it a hiring criteria. The real question is whether it's correlated with good KPIs, (and the secondary question of whether your KPIs express your business needs.)

It can be, so you have to guard against it.

But what is for certain is that anyone attempting to follow this example will be flooded by applications of lower qualification in general -- making it difficult for any small sized company to deal with.

Just imagine if you had to conduct the search for applicants with a 10x larger pool of candidates. The sheer work involved is sure to cause problems of their own nature. Balance that against how much you really need to find diversity.

I don't think it's a particularly big problem. Honestly, I'd be happy to have a 10x larger pool of applicants, as that means I'd get sooner to the ones I want to hire.

I think the trick is to structure the hiring process so that you can quickly weed out the people you don't want. Currently the trick I'm trying: I have candidates write 1-2 sentences in response to one of five hopefully interesting questions:

http://www.codeforamerica.org/jobs/chime/

So far there's been a very good correlation between "can write a useful short answer" and "is worth talking to". Whereas there hasn't been a good correlation with "prestige level of school".

> Just imagine if you had to conduct the search for applicants with a 10x larger pool of candidates. The sheer work involved is sure to cause problems of their own nature.

You can reduce the size of the pool of applications that you consider essentially arbitrarily. Shuffle the applications and throw a certain percentage of them into the bin without looking at them. The composition of the set of applications that you consider matters, but the number of applications, past a certain group size that ensures a reasonable cross-section of the application set, isn't particularly relevant.

Unless you know that university graduation is a good indicator of future work success, you may as well do that and get the diversity for free. You're under absolutely no obligation to consider a thousand applicants for one position or anything like that.

"Having attended a specific university" isn't as strong a predictor of performance as you might think. Even "having attended university" isn't a particularly strong filtering mechanism, as E&Y recently dropping the degree threshold shows: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ernst-and-young-dr...

As an aside, it's funny that both articles use the same stock image.

Granted, it's anecdotal, but I've personally seen university graduates that seemingly aren't capable of reading basic instructions or submitting a useful CV. Conversely, I've seen applicants with zero university who wowed during the interview, and went on to wow everyone as a very skilled employee.

I think the 'filtering mechanism' you speak of is vastly overrated, and I'm excited to see things like this happening. People should be hired based on ability and skill, not a piece of paper that they somehow acquired.

Note that this is the BBC, and applies to Deloitte UK. It is unclear if it applies to Deloitte worldwide.

The university system in the UK is completely different to in the US, so hypotheses around it being to do with the cost of university or student loans need substantial adjustments to make sense in the UK context.

Can you say more about the differences? I don't know what they would be at all - I thought they were very similar.

1) Many degrees are 3 years rather than 4.

2) Tuition fees for UK/EU students are capped at 9k GBP (13.6k USD) per year.

...in England and Wales. This doesn't hold for Scotland/Northern Ireland.

Also, student loans are pretty different[1]. For example, the only company allowed to give them is a non-profit, and they get cancelled if they have been outstanding for a (fairly long) period of time[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_Ki...

10 days ago EY drops the 2:1 degree requirement [1] for UK applicants...now Deloitte feels the need to one up them by removing college branding from the consideration altogether. Next up is PWC rejecting any applicant with a college degree and poaching them right out of high school instead :)

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ernst-and-young-dr...

PwC, and other Big 4 and even small accounting firms in the UK already have a school leavers program.

You join the firms out of school, they will ask you to register with ICAEW/ACCA and study to become a chartered accountant (CPA in the US), the firm will provide you with books, exam fees and tuition fees while you earn on the job. After three years while your peers finishing up at university you will have a solid work history with great qualifications with no debt. You can even get a degree if you join ACCA for just ₤200 for submitting a thesis and no additional exams.

While in the US, to become a CPA, you would need masters level education in most cases to even appear for the CPA exams. UK and almost all commonwealth countries have programs and institutes that offer professional qualification opportunities with even more prestige than the average university route. Accountancy is one of the few fields where one can get-qualified-on-job in the Anglosphere (US, Canada excluded).

ICAEW : http://careers.icaew.com/school-students-leavers

ACCA : http://www.accaglobal.com/uk/en/qualifications/accountancy-c...

ACCA + B.Sc (Hons.) :http://www.accaglobal.com/gb/en/help/oxford-brookes.html

> While in the US, to become a CPA, you would need masters level education in most cases to even appear for the CPA exams.

Source? This sounds ludicrous.

http://www.ais-cpa.com/outside.html

"Most states have adopted a 150 university semester hour educational requirement. A few states require only a four year university degree." Depending on how your hours are calculated, I think 150 might require a year of grad school generally. My school does 3 hours of class per week x 5 classes per semester x 8 semesters = 120 hours.

On the other extreme, the CFA institute requires 4 years of experience to sit the CFA exams.

I just checked the CFA Institute website. They say you must have a "bachelor's (or equivalent) degree or be in the final year" of one OR four year work experience (in any field) OR combined education + work experience of four years.

I think what you are saying is true for using the designation (becoming a chartered holder)--you need to have the practical experience of four years.

CFA Enrolment eligibility : https://www.cfainstitute.org/programs/cfaprogram/register/Pa...

Experience required : https://www.cfainstitute.org/community/membership/process/Pa...

To become a CPA the candidate needs 150 credit hour education. This can be achieved in two ways:

1. Get a masters degree in accounting

2. Bachelor degree + other courses for credit from online diploma mills (University of Phoenix) or similar accredited educational institutions (I think community colleges would work too).

Both are complete waste of time and money. In the UK you can leave school, pass 14 or 15 exams costing about a £100 pounds + institute membership fee of £100/year and obtain the experience of three years then you are qualified to obtain a license to practice. If you are with a accountancy firm, they will sponsor all the main costs and provide you with study leave for exams.

I just read another article today [Tulip] that says the same thing about US medical education where one can study for becoming doctor only after completing an undergraduate degree which might have no relation to medicine. Author compares that with Ireland where one studies for 5 years after leaving school instead of the 8 that the US doctors need to spend.

I think it is similar case for becoming a lawyer too: four year degree then JD while in other countries they go and obtain an LLB (3 years) and then appear for the bar exams.

CPA eligibility

New York : http://nasba.org/exams/cpaexam/newyork/ California : http://www.dca.ca.gov/cba/applicants/tip_sheet.pdf Other states : http://nasba.org/exams/cpaexam/

Against [Tulip] subsidies : http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies...

Are they doing this just for social aspects? The article doesn't cite any hard reason why they'd do this. You'd think that with so many applicants and positions, they'd have lots of data that'd let them know if university attended is a good predictor of performance.

As well as the opposite: If folks of different background really "innovate differently", then again, they should have the data to prove this. Like "while Xs only make up 5% of our workforce, 15% of all good-whatevers come from them".

Or at least, they should investigate after this experiment is tried out and determine if it had real impact.

  You'd think that with so many applicants
  and positions, they'd have lots of data

It's easy to gather data about whether the hires you made were good hires.

It's difficult to gather data about whether the rejections you made were good rejections.

This is interesting as an accounting student. The big 4 audit firms which hire the bulk or entry-level accountants have traditionally played favorites with schools. This comes as quite a surprise to me because they haven't really shown any effort otherwise about not picking favorite schools. Although this is across the pond, so maybe it'll be different in the US.

I've about to hire and I've been thinking trying to build a process that blinds to as much as possible: gender, race, age, university, previous employers. What else? If you're doing this, please get in touch, I'd like to talk about how you go about it.

Being blind to gender, age, and race make perfect sense -- but not University or Employer history. I would want to know if my applicant succeeded at a challenging vs. mediocre school, and if their previous employer was at all relevant in the industry. People can often present themselves well, but their history might reflect inconsistencies.

Picture, name, address and family situation.

The term for that process is "anonymized application" in German speaking countries. In Switzerland they made good experiences with that (German article: http://www.3sat.de/page/?source=/nano/gesellschaft/149883/in...).

In my opinion, the best way to ensure that you are "blinded" properly: Find someone from a minority who is conscious of the obstacles people from minorities face. Tell that person "I'm a racist, misogynist, idiot full of prejudices. Make sure I can only hire based on qualification." Have that person screen all applications and black out all revealing information. This could be a perfect short-term gig for a 2nd year student in a relevant field (relevant to the social aspects of the hiring process, not the positions you hire for).

PS: Explicitly listing the things you do not want in an application in the job post will probably help out weed people who cannot even follow simple instructions ;)

Why wouldn't such a person that you hired ONLY pass along resumes of minorities (or edit and sabotage the resumes of the majority candidates)? After all, you've hand-picked them to be someone conscious of the struggles AND told them that you're racist, misogynistic, prejudiced, and an idiot...

Because this is not some hypothetical exercise in bulletproofing the application process but some real world question where we can assume that the person I responded to is able to hire a person that understands what it is all about.

Get an envelope. Put the number of resumes in it on the front. Sign it. Get back that number of resumes.

Seriously this isn't a hard problem to solve.

This should be standard practice for all businesses though I don't think that it will happen any time soon. All application processes should be as double blind as possible. So 2 people collect the resumes they number then and send it off to the redactor. The redactor send the envelope to HR/hiring manager. Then from that people should be selected. When interviewed people should be administered a test to look for competence if necessary and if not only then the interview should be conducted in such a way that the persons background, race, and gender should be obscured.

I understand that much of the value of a person on a team is how well they get along with the people who they work with so this needs to be addressed. Either with some kind of trail period where their coworkers can file complaints but they have to be weighed against their productivity as judged by a neutral party so people can't just vote minorities and/or genders off the island per say.

This is infeasible to implement but would be fair.

They seem to focus their campus recruitment events (http://www.deloitte.co.uk/aem/student-events-calendar.cfm) heavily towards the Russell Group universities (Oxbridge, London, Durham etc.) If they want a more diverse talent pool, why don't they hold more events further afield?

huge reflection of the commoditization of education. Essentially the only thing they're checking for now is 'did you go to college?' The top 10-20 schools will continue to standout, but outside of the 'name brands' the education is perceived as all being on the same level

Who's to say the top 20 schools are really that good, though? They're on top thanks to arbitrary, 'commodity' rankings.

Why is half the article in quotes?

It must be quoting from some source that isn't linked. If anyone can find it, we might change the URL to it. HN generally prefers original sources.

The article appears to be based on this press release: http://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/press-releases/articles...

Somehow I can't bring myself to switch to that corpspeak. If people disagree we can do it though.

For that matter, why is "hides" quoted in the title? I thought it was sarcastic or something.

This graph says everything you need to know about higher education: http://www.businessinsider.com/inflation-update-2011-1

I would suggest that academia is in a bubble, but many of the top Universities are sitting on massive endowments. They have a nearly endless supply of cash.

Top universities are benefiting from globalization the same way that real estate owners in global cities are...there is an almost endless demand for their product. If all qualified high schoolers from around the world could participate in an auction to win a spot in Harvard or MIT's incoming class, the annual tuition would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. But this only applies to a small cluster of top schools and it drops off pretty quickly.

Government involvement in student loans is the direct cause of that.

Are you saying governments shouldn't create policy that allows student loans?

No they shouldn't when loans are guaranteed to cover your tuition and for the most part you are guaranteed a loan prices soar because there is no incentive to lower the costs, the uni's make more money, and banks and the government makes more money, and student are stuck with the bill.

This doesn't mean that governments shouldn't fund publicly accessible higher education, it just means that they need to do it in a smarter way.

Picking up the cheque (permanently or temporarily) always results in inflation, we see this in health care, we see this in housing, we see this in education.

I agree that student loans don't do the student much justice and there must be a smarter way of funding education. In Australia our HECs loan system essentially funds research which may benefit society as a whole but hardly benefits students when course content is in some cases years out of date. As it's a loan system that graduates don't repay until their income reaches a certain threshold (essentially an extra tax), with government approval this has allowed course fees to creep upwards.

I don't agree with the general comment on inflation. For instance, I'm not aware of Australia's medicare system leading to higher medical treatment costs. If anything it provides a base level of care and limits the amount that any private medical provider could provide.

In any case I'm certain that private insurance companies facilitate the same kind of inflation as they don't seem too concerned about the cost of services rendered when they can simply pass that onto their customers as a higher premium (which they in turn benefit from). At least where government spending is concerned, inflation can be managed.

Governments probably shouldn't subsidize a thing without implementing some sort of price control, as well.

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