{"id":35049,"date":"2023-07-13T07:26:50","date_gmt":"2023-07-13T11:26:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ifintechworld.com\/news\/the-supreme-court-just-disrupted-elite-firm-hiring-too\/"},"modified":"2023-07-13T07:26:52","modified_gmt":"2023-07-13T11:26:52","slug":"the-supreme-court-just-disrupted-elite-firm-hiring-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ifintechworld.com\/?p=35049","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court Just Disrupted Elite Firm Hiring, Too"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If top investment banks, consulting and law firms care about a diverse entry-level recruiting pool, they\u2019re going to have to develop a wider pipeline.<\/h2>\n

A<\/abbr>s the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s main commencement speaker in 2014, John Legend walked thousands of soon-to-be graduates through the career path he took when he graduated from that Ivy League school in 1999. \u201cI had many of the traditional opportunities in front of you now, and I took a job at the Boston Consulting Group,\u201d recalled Legend, who majored in English with an emphasis in African American Studies. \u201cI had followed the path that the Penn graduate was supposed to take, but I didn\u2019t fall in love. I immediately started thinking about how I could leave BCG and become a full-time musician.\u201d Since ditching consulting, he\u2019s won 12 Grammys, including Best New Artist in 2006, two Emmys, an Oscar and a Tony.<\/p>\n

The nonchalance with which Legend alluded to UPenn graduates being funneled into jobs at one of the most prestigious consulting firms in the country neatly illustrates how elite employers have for decades treated elite universities as their main pipeline for entry-level talent.<\/p>\n

If the Supreme Court\u2019s 6-to-3 decision in June ordering an end to race conscious college admissions leads to less diversity among the graduates of these schools (and evidence from California, where voters banned affirmative action in 1996, suggests it will), the talent pipeline that companies rely on will also become less diverse. That means employers are going to have to recruit more widely\u2014if, that is, they\u2019re committed to maintaining at least the level of diversity in hiring they have now.<\/p>\n

In fact, the global chair of none other than Boston Consulting Group acknowledged as much in a LinkedIn post reaffirming the firm\u2019s commitment to inclusion. \u201cRegardless of how universities evolve, business leaders including BCG have a responsibility to ensure that value-creating diversity goals are still achieved,\u201d wrote Richard Lesser. \u201cThis may require broader networks for sourcing talent and new models for developing talent that are not afforded some of the benefits of today\u2019s leading schools.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCompanies might have to look at other schools or other ways to recruit talent that fits their economic needs,\u201d says Marcus Childress, co-chair of the law firm Jenner & Block\u2019s DEI protection task force.<\/p>\n

Just how narrow is today\u2019s pipeline? For her award-winning 2015 book, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, <\/em>sociologist Lauren Rivera, now a professor at Northwestern University\u2019s Kellogg School of Management, interviewed 120 hiring decision makers at 24 top-tier professional service firms\u2014investment banks, consultancies and law firms. These employers, as she described in her book and a Harvard Business Review<\/em> article, typically recruit extensively from only three to five of the most elite institutions, flying employees to campus for information sessions, cocktail parties and dinners and interviewing scores or even hundreds of candidates from these \u201ccore\u201d schools. The firms also typically each have a \u201ctarget\u201d group of another 5 to 15 schools, where they offer more limited recruiting and interview slots.<\/p>\n

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\u201cFirms allocate specific numbers of interview slots\u2014and in many cases, offers\u2014to each campus before students\u2019 qualifications are ever reviewed,\u201d Rivera tells Forbes<\/em>. \u201cSo competition is systematically skewed toward students at elite institutions. Everyone else is left fighting for the scraps.\u201d She adds that this phenomenon hasn\u2019t changed much in the eight years since her book was published, though recruiters may have added a school or two.<\/p>\n

Rivera, who studied hiring at these professional service firms for her Harvard PhD thesis, found students at the most elite universities\u2014even those majoring in the liberal arts and with no business experience\u2014have increasingly gravitated to certain elite business firms. \u201cAt Harvard, over 70 percent of each senior class typically applies to investment banks or consulting firms through on-campus recruitment,\u2019\u2019 she writes. In one campus newspaper ad, she points out, an investment bank advertised to Ivy League students with the tagline \u201cno experience wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seniors attending colleges that aren\u2019t in one of those two groups were usually stuck applying through a firm\u2019s website and were unlikely to get an interview unless they had a personal connection at the firm, through a current employee or client. Rivera offered this telling example of how connections can work for those who don\u2019t go to the most selective schools. A banker she interviewed explained the firm had recruited him from his well-regarded, but not top-10 liberal arts college because the bank CEO\u2019s own daughter was in school there. Now the school has become a regular on the bank\u2019s target list.<\/p>\n

In other words, real world connections to the economic elite count for a lot, but young folks may also be able to enter that world by going to the right schools. (This could be one reason why research suggests the income benefits of going to an elite school are more substantial for underrepresented minorities and for students from lower-income families than for other graduates of these schools.)<\/p>\n

Rivera explains recruiters focus on elite schools as a shortcut to identifying applicants with \u201cintellectual horsepower,\u2019\u2019 saving themselves time, effort and money. \u201cThe best kid in the country may be at Bowling Green,\u201d one investment banker told her. \u201cBut to go to Bowling Green [and] interview 20 kids just to find that one needle in the haystack doesn\u2019t make sense, when you can go to Harvard [and have] \u2026 30 kids that are all super qualified and great.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Rivera says her ongoing research on elite law schools shows that graduates from those schools don\u2019t perform any better as associates than graduates with other educational backgrounds once they start their jobs. \u201cSo much goes into gaining admission to and enrolling in an elite university that has nothing to do with a person\u2019s intelligence or work ethic and instead is based on opportunities that we know from decades of research are tilted in favor of children from white and wealthy families,\u2019\u2019 she observes. Notably, the Supreme Court hasn\u2019t outlawed admission preferences for legacy applicants\u2014those whose parents or grandparents attended the school.<\/p>\n

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One irony that emerges from Rivera\u2019s research: Some hiring officials she interviewed \u201clamented a lack of racial diversity in their companies and blamed the applicant \u2018pipeline.\u2019\u201d In other words, they wanted elite schools to offer up an even more diverse candidate pool, but weren\u2019t looking farther afield themselves.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what Dave Wilkin, CEO and co-founder of talent mentorship platform Ten Thousand Coffees has found. \u201cOrganizations rely on colleges to do a better job in diversifying their engineering, business and other programs,\u201d he says. In the wake of the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling, he adds, \u201cThis is now going to fundamentally change, which will risk how organizations can rely on colleges to foster the diverse and inclusive representation of \u2026 early talent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Annette Tyman, a labor and employment partner at the law firm Seyfarth Shaw, agrees. \u201cThere are certainly some jobs where you do need that college background or experience, but that may not necessarily be so, and that\u2019s the kind of thing that employers are going to have to challenge in their own hiring practices,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Rivera, for her part, is skeptical about whether companies will actually consider talent from other institutions. \u201cHow seriously they will consider these applications\u2014given these deeply entrenched stereotypes linking educational prestige to underlying merit in our country\u2014is an open question,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Plus, there\u2019s another issue hanging over how elite firms may adjust to less diversity in the graduating classes of elite colleges: the Supreme Court\u2019s affirmative action decision could have a chilling effect on companies\u2019 own employee and board diversity initiatives, as they worry they\u2019ll be sued next.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s already happening, says Ishan Bhabha, co-chair of both Jenner & Block\u2019s education practice and its DEI protection task force. \u201cThe threats have already arrived,\u201d he says. \u201c[Companies are] already being sued over program initiatives. I think this decision is going to increase the volume and the severity, absolutely, but it\u2019s already here. The wave is starting as we speak.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/h4>\n

MORE FROM FORBES<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

Read the full article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If top investment banks, consulting and law firms care about a diverse entry-level recruiting pool, they\u2019re going to have to develop a wider pipeline. As the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s main commencement speaker in 2014, John Legend walked thousands of soon-to-be graduates through the career path he took when he graduated from that Ivy League school […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35050,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[236],"tags":[83],"class_list":["post-35049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-featured"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Supreme Court Just Disrupted Elite Firm Hiring, Too | iFintechWorld<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"If top investment banks, consulting and law firms care about a diverse entry-level recruiting pool, they\u2019re going to have to develop a wider pipeline. 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