> I strongly believe that the word like 'Harvard' biases perceptions right from the start of the interview. As do appearance, culture, possible demarcations of political orientation.
I'm only really familiar with engineering interviews, but for those, in the past decade and especially recently, most of these factors are irrelevant.
The trend since at least 2005 has been ever more strongly favoring real, quantifiable, comparable, job-related challenges. Most everything else is a distraction, which interviewers are trained to ignore.
This was a result of scientific studies of the older interview paradigms, which indeed suffered from some of the biases you mentioned and were - for these and other reasons - inefficient at predicting good job performance.
This is doubly true for intellectual work like engineering, where quirky folk (including those who have poor appearance, not much interest in non-geeky culture, etc.) are common and often the best candidates.
Bottom line: performance is measured and quantified on well-defined tasks, the rest is largely fluff, unless the candidate is being a blatant jerk or something of that extreme nature.
> I believe that even at a supposedly imminently professional place as Google ... that the same person interviewing with a 'thick southern accent' who enjoyed 'hunting and fishing' would have more difficulty than otherwise.
Do you have any data or evidence to back this up?
I'm inclined to believe that someone like that would, if anything, stand out if they performed well on the technical part. They'll be the "CS genius hillbilly".
That's another thing you're missing: the main challenges provide such a strong and salient signal of performance, that the rest of the data is largely interpreted in light of that performance.
That goes for school brand too, by the way.
If a candidate from MIT does very badly, the reaction is not "let's forgive him, he's from MIT" but rather "for someone who got accepted and graduated MIT, this guy sure did underperform" and a prompt rejection.
> I totally agree that 'school' is a reason to 'fly them out'
School brand alone will not get you a plane ticket. It might get you a phone screen. There's too many bomb candidates from top schools to just freely shower them all with plane tickets.
By the way, I agree with the claims made in the article. With top schools like Harvard giving legacy candidates 6 times chances of admission, you're going to have a lot of Harvard students who got there because their parents did, and/or their grandparents before them, etc.
That means a lot of bomb candidates from even the very, very best schools. Hiring businesses are aware of this.
The brand power of these top schools therefore falls short of what you seem to believe.
Sure, you can get a phone screen with a Harvard degree. But you can get the very same one with an NYU degree too. And once you do, it doesn't matter that you're "only from NYU".