How employers and career services can make college recruiting more equitable

The process that employers and college career service offices follow varies from school to school and has also evolved over the years at most schools. Most of that evolution has been positive for those, like me, who want to see a more equitable recruiting process.

Untiil a few years ago, it was very common for employers to strongly prefer to hire candidates whose grade point averages exceeded some number, who were enrolled in a particular major, and who attended a short list of schools. For example, an employer might strongly prefer to hire students with GPAs exceeding 3.5 who were enrolled in a mechanical engineering program and attended schools A, B, or C. Any candidates who did not satisfy all of those requirements might have been able to apply and perhaps may have been considered, but the likelihood of them actually being hired was slim to none.

Today, most employers no longer care about GPA as they’ve found that it wasn’t well correlated to work performance and sometimes even negatively correlated. Those with the highest GPAs are also those most likely to hop from one job to another, so they often didn’t stay with an employer nearly as many years as those whose GPAs were lower, so the lower GPA cohort was actually the more productive.

Similarly, more and more employers have become major and even school agnostic for many of their roles. Now, if you want to be an engineer, you need to be in an engineering major as that profession requires licensures. Nursing, law, accounting, and some others do too. But, if you’re looking to start your career in sales as more students do than any other occupational field, you can literally graduate with any major. And employers have discovered that major is also poorly correlated with workplace productivity, so many of them no longer care about your major.

Finally, more and more employers are becoming school agnostic, meaning that they don’t really care what school you attend. Sure, they’re most likely to interview you if you attend the school across the street but if you have some kind of tie to the city in which the role is located, most are now happy to interview you via Zoom. Before Covid, few employers and candidates made a practice of interviewing via platforms such as Zoom, but now virtually all do and are very comfortable doing so.

The fewer the number of candidates who are excluded from the hiring process due to their GPA, major, and school, the more inclusive that hiring process is. And the more inclusive the hiring process, the more equitable that hiring process.