School spirit:
It’s possible to get past a company’s preferred-school mindset
Walk into certain companies during the beginning of football season and if you’re in the presence of some enthusiastic employees, you’re likely to see cubicles draped in maize and blue or Crimson and white. “Flying your
school colors is a big thing for certain graduates, especially if they’re working with others who attended the same school,” says Rebecca Drake, a career adviser from New York. “And it happens more often than you think. A lot of companies like going to the well often if the employees they’ve already hired do well. It makes sense. You go back to what makes you successful.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s always a good idea.
For 12 years, Glen Bidwell helped staff a large insurance company based in the Midwest. While he knew it was important to hire a diverse workforce, he says it was also implied that new employees should come through certain programs at certain universities. “They wanted a diverse group of people but they wanted to make sure they all went through the same training before they were hired,” Bidwell says. “We’d work directly with certain schools for certain departments and as a result, ended up with a division with
employees that looked different but ultimately shared the same philosophies and mindsets.”
Bidwell says it was easy to understand why. “They all came through the same funnel,” he says. “Universities are wonderful places but they also shape minds in their own ways. MBA students from a certain school may have a very distinct approach to risk, to research, to new ideas and
to other aspects of their job, no matter if they grew up on opposite ends of the earth.”
Bidwell, who retired several years ago, moved to Sarasota, Florida, and has spent his time since “golfing,
betting on horses and decompressing from corporate life.” He says he thinks hiring too many people with the same background, whether they share the same race, gender, hometown, experience or school, is problematic. “It contributes to a company’s ‘sameness,’” he says. “I’m not saying there’s a group-think thing going on at universities but I do know people from very different backgrounds can be very similar once they spent four or more years in the same place.”
Bidwell says he addressed this issue with two of his
former employers — the aforementioned insurance company and a Chicago real estate development firm — and initially received positive feedback. “They’d pay lip-service to the idea of casting a wider net but when the final hiring decision is up to someone who went to Northwestern or Michigan State or Vanderbilt, those managers will — nine
times out of 10 — go with the person from Northwestern, Michigan State or Vanderbilt, respectively.”
Bidwell says his theory was most obvious in March of each year. “I’d walk on a particular department’s floor during the NCAA tournament and there’d be so many logos from a certain college team that I felt like I was working in their alumni office,” he says.
In a recent TED talk, Rocío Lorenzo, managing director at the Boston Consulting Group, based in Munich, Germany, said that innovative companies usually have a diverse employee base, citing a study from Technical University of Munich. Before presenting them with the results of the study, which focused on gender and other factors, Lorenzo said many corporate leaders weren’t convinced that a diverse workforce was good for business. “Many leaders I met saw diversity as something to comply with out of political correctness, or best case, the right thing
to do, but not as a business priority,” Lorenzo said. “They just did not have a reason to believe that diversity would help them achieve their most immediate, pressing goals: hitting the numbers, delivering the new product — the real goals they are measured by.”
If you’re a job applicant who knows you’re trying to break into a company’s department that mainly hires people from a particular school — one different from your own — it’s possible to use your own alma mater as a selling point.
“I tell the graduates of the Northern Illinois and Drake universities of the world that they should tout their school’s own ideologies and merits if asked,” says Donald Black, a career coach in Chicago. “The school probably won’t even come up but if it does, don’t run from it just because the person you’re interviewing with went to an Ivy or has his or her office plastered with Duke paraphernalia. Tell them what was great about your college experience from an academic standpoint. Tell them what you loved about it from a social standpoint. Help them realize you would provide a balanced, intellectual and creative alternative to some of their existing employees.”