Employers versus Colleges
Economics professor and blogger Bryan Caplan asks the following question:
Colleges care about applicants’ extracurricular activities. Employers don’t. What’s going on? I’m tempted to just repeat my adage that, “Non-profits are crazy,” but even non-profit employers don’t seem very concerned about how you spend your spare time.
Theories?
Economics professor and blogger Tyler Cowen “takes the bait”, and puts forward a theory: colleges want to pick people who are good prospects for future donations.
My theory is that both professors ought to get out more.
I started a software company that hires many university graduates. We care about extracurricular activities. I was a hiring partner at a large management consulting firm. We cared about extracurricular activities. My first job out of school was at AT&T Laboratories. They asked me about extracurricular activities at many points in the interviewing process
But have the companies where I worked been bizarre outliers? CareerBuilder does an annual survey of several thousand hiring managers and HR professionals who say that prior experience is “one of the most important factors they look for in applications from recent college graduates.” In the survey, employers reported that the following activities qualify as pertinent work experience for recent college graduates to include on their resumes:
• Internships
• Part-time jobs in another area or field
• Volunteer work
• Involvement in school organizations
• Class work
• Involvement in managing activities for sororities and fraternities
• Participation in sports
A little while ago, I commented on how I was tired of seeing hobbies on resumes (I’m a professional recruiter). This touched off a vigorous debate about their worth, so I would say your experiences are not that off the mark.
Even though I hate the Hobbies section on resumes (mostly because people write inane things like, “I enjoy books, movies, cooking and sports”, which tells me nothing), I do find it useful to have some extracurricular information about candidates – especially junior people and new grads.
If I’m interviewing a senior SAP Business Transformation Architect, what does it matter if he’s a volunteer judge for local dog shows? However, if I’m interviewing someone with no work history (a new grad), I need some information that will allow me to learn more about the person.
I think your theory (that they should get our more) is correct.
— Jonathan · Apr 19, 03:04 PM · #
sorry – post cut off
(though employers also will give an applicant lots of extra “points” for things like having worked to put oneself through school, military service, etc. that show character.)
And this is good and proper. While academic success is important, both as an indicator of raw intellectual horsepower and general work ethic (while you’re in school your “job” after all is to be a student), an applicant with a strong extra-curricular record, all else being equal, will also likely have good time management skills, a better ability to work with people, a better ability to deal with ambiguous goals, etc.
Bryan Caplan strikes me as the kind of libertarian economist who is always chiding academic leftists for not understanding the “real world” while constantly displaying ignorance of the real world himself.
— sd · Apr 19, 03:51 PM · #
I’m a partner in a software company and we too look at this pretty closely. Further, I know from insiders that Google — which attracts the best computer science talent in the world right now — puts a huge emphasis on outide activities in its hiring process. They don’t want to hire geniuses who just sit in the basement writing code at all hours, never seeing the light of day. This in a field where there very often is a right vs. wrong answer to many of the interview questions.
We interviewed someone like that the other day. Super smart, but absolutely no social skills or other indication that he gets out into the real world.
— Derek Scruggs · Apr 20, 12:21 AM · #
I have never had anyone interviewing me ask about my recreational activities, and I once had a resume-writing coach warn against including such things unless they were in some way germane to the job I was applying for. The danger here is twofold: blathering on about your hobbies takes up valuable resume space better used to highlight job-related accomplishments, and even an innocent-sounding hobby might give hints of personal beliefs or aspects of your life that could offend or be controversial. Volunteer for GLAAD— you are probably gay and a political liberal. Sing in a church choir— uh-oh, you might be a Fundamentalist and evangelize on company time.
— JonF · Apr 20, 11:33 PM · #
I once received a resume from a new grad for a job opening that included this extracurricular:
“Cheerleader, U. of Miami”
I took the resume to my boss, Bill, and we discussed for 15 seconds whether this was relevant, and then he called her to invite her in for an interview, but she’d already accepted a better job.
— Steve Sailer · Apr 21, 05:18 AM · #
I interviewed at a lot of those large managment consulting firms, and eventually worked at one. They may tell themselves that they care about extracurricular activities, but the truth is they hire kids with awesome grades who present themselves well in an interview and also can solve the ever-present “case” questions during the interview process. Perhaps those things correlate with extracurricular participation. Perhaps when all else seemed equal between candidates, extracurriculars tilted the balance. But that’s as far as it goes. I bet a similar story is true at Google.
I suspect the reason the academics find no correlation betweem extracurriclars and employment is analagous to the reason SAT scores don’t appear correlate with college performance. If you send a kid with 1400 SAT and a kid with a 900 SAT to the same school and they study the same things, the 1400 will do better. But only kids with high SAT scores go to Harvard, and it is hard to tease out the performance difference caused by a 100 point difference in SATs, for kids who are not taking the same classes.
The management consultant firms only ever interview what they deem to be the cream of the crop. They recruit only at the most prestigious schools and once there they look only for kids with very high grades, preferably in challenging majors. They actually prefer engineering majors to business majors.
If you are a student trying to get a management consulting job, then by all means, do some extracurricular activities. But only if you can do it without any impact on your grades at all.
— tom · Apr 21, 02:40 PM · #