Demand for talented engineers out of college who bring a different lived experience to tech has never been higher, yet companies are passing on precisely these students via traditional methods. Confounding the issue even further is the fundamental question of whether having attended a top school has much bearing on candidate quality in the first place
.. The focus of companies on elite schools has notable, negative implications for the diversity of their applicants. In particular, many schools that companies traditionally visit are notably lacking in diversity, especially when it comes to race and socioeconomic status. According to a survey of computer science students at Stanford, there were just fifteen Hispanic female and fifteen black female computer science majors in the 2015 graduating class total. In this analysis, the Stanford 2015 CS major was 9% Hispanic and 6% black.
.. the Harvard CS major was just 3% black and 5 percent Hispanic. Companies that are diversity-forward and constrained to recruiting at the same few schools end up competing over this small pool of diverse students. Meanwhile, there is an entire ocean of qualified, racially diverse students from less traditional backgrounds whom companies are overlooking.
.. “four in 10 students from the top 0.1 percent attend an Ivy League or elite university
.. The article finds that the few lower-income students who end up at elite colleges do about as well as their more affluent classmates but that attending an elite versus non-elite college makes a huge difference in future income.
.. Career-wise, it’s that first job or internship you get while you’re still in school that can determine what opportunities you have access to in the future.
.. Not having an internship at a top tech company already — quite the catch-22 — puts her at a disadvantage. Anthony has little to no chance of hearing back from employers via his applications online
.. Mason, the Harvard student, attends an event on campus with Facebook engineers teaching him how to pass the technical interview.
.. Given that technical interviewing is a game, it is important that everyone knows the rules, spoken and unspoken. There are many practice resources available
.. Because of our completely blind, skills-first approach, we’ve seen an interesting phenomenon happen time and time again: when a student unmasks at the end of a successful interview, the company in question realizes that the student who just aced their technical phone screen was one whose resume was sitting at the bottom of the pile all along.
.. With interviewing.io, a mid-sized startup can staff their entire intern class for the same cost as attending 1-2 career fairs at top schools… with a good chunk of those interns coming from underrepresented backgrounds