Cleveland Roadshow with Joel 4-29 / Unusual Pattern in Elite College Admissions |
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April 13th, 2008 -- by Martin Snyder
Two items this week. First is the Recruiting Roadshow coming to Cleveland- we are proud to sponsor the event and host it at our facility on April 29. Joel will be speaking, along with John Sumser, Don Ramer, and Jason Morris. The RR’s are free and they include a light breakfast and buffet lunch. If you can make it, it should be well worth your time to experience the event. Please register ASAP- as we are limited to 120 people.
Second item is an interesting paradox I encountered reading my favorite newspaper of record. Last weeks NYT included two separate articles about college admissions; one discussed the unbelievable competition among applicants for the very top schools, and the other discussed the unbelievable competition among top (but not the very top) schools for applicants.
Eye popping stats: more than 3300 applicants to Harvard this year were first in their high school classes. Over 6000 applicants had perfect (yes perfect) SAT scores. Harvard rejected approx. 93% of its applicants.
I touched on this topic when I blogged about ebay- the irrational value that a 100% feedback rating gives to a seller compared to 99.5%- there may be no meaningful difference, yet the former can charge more for their wares. Likewise, if you are Harvard (or Yale, Princeton, Stanford and perhaps a few others) you can be absurdly selective, while just one slight tier below you would have to scramble for applicants by offering gourmet dining halls and other perks.
This says something about employment branding I’m sure. If you are Microsoft, Google, Cisco (perhaps GE but maybe not after Friday’s earnings call) you can afford nutty levels of perfection in your candidates. If you are one step off the elite, it would seem that you have to work as hard as anyone else in the economy.
And yet the outcomes seem to be similar- even if you select the very cream of the crop, it would seem that a mass of ‘lesser’ (but still high quality) candidates will (or would) do just as well in the real economy. How does that impact YOUR recruiting in the real world ?
April 13th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
One thing that you don’t touch on is that being a Harvard or a Google probably has to deal with thousands of “garbage applications” from people how have no business applying. That makes them look all the more selective.