A strange little story appeared in Business Insider a few weeks back, 9 Things Your Resume Needs if you want to be Hired by Apple or Google is a curious view into the mindset of Silicon Valley.
Purporting to be an extract from a book written by a former recruiter who claims to have worked for Apple, Google and Microsoft, the story exposes a weakness in Silicon Valley and the technological elite which may cause the very disruptions they have unleashed to work against them.
The nine items are fascinating for the elitist, US-centric view of the world they portray and each is worth investigating on their own.
If you graduated from an elite college, your chances of getting an interview vastly improve
Yes, where you went to school does matter to the tech giants. Of course there are exceptions, but McDowell says an Ivy League or other top university will get you noticed.
There’s not much more to add to this, except to note that the vast majority of students whose families can afford such an education are from the upper middle class.
The Googles and Apples like to see relevant internship experience.
If you waited tables when you were 19, that isn’t attractive.
If you are lucky enough to get into a an Ivy League school on a scholarship or manage to scrape together the money you may still not make the cut.
To the author, only those with sufficient wealth to participate in unpaid internships are going to get jobs at the top Silicon Valley companies.
Your major matters
Sorry liberal arts people or chemical engineers, you’ll need another way in to Google or Apple.
This is an interesting one, Silicon Valley boosters often talk about the creative process and how coders are artists however according to the recruiter that’s just lip service.
She encourages students to pick majors that are directly relevant to Google or Apple. Finance, accounting, marketing or computer science majors have the best shot of being noticed by a tech recruiter. At the very least, minor in one of those fields.
A focus on finance, accounting and marketing is the same as any old corporation – you could be going for a job with AT&T, Goldman Sachs or the government with qualifications like that. So much for unique.
Dissing chemical engineering is particularly interesting as Chem Eng graduates have passed one of the toughest university degrees. Whats more, the demands of mobile computing devices means battery technology is one of the most pressing issues facing Silicon Valley at the moment. Chemical Engineers are the folk who will solve this problem.
Big tech companies like to see people giving back to their communities.
Volunteering can be a great way to buff up your resume. That said, McDowell warns: “don’t serve soup in a soup kitchen.”
Instead she suggests hunting for a sales or marketing position, or offering to help a charity with its website and design.
This is a really obnoxious statement – basically saying we want to you volunteer, but we don’t want you to help people.
Just how many sales and marketing people are needed by soup kitchens, volunteer fire brigades or community pantries is open to debate.
A bigger issue with this mentality is that it favours bureaucrats and paper shufflers rather than doers. Which again is something anathema to the public statements of Silicon Valley’s leaders.
They also like good spellers and speakers.
Writing and communications skills aren’t just necessary for media jobs. They’re important in any career you’ll have.
Well, duh.
If you are buddies with college professors, that’s a plus.
Professors aren’t just impressed by how you do in their classes. McDowell suggests helping them with research projects, asking for help and attending office hours, or becoming a teaching assistant.
That doesn’t hurt, but it’s pretty basic vanilla advice and again it’s tough luck if you have to do a shift at the local fast food restaurant so you can feed yourself.
Show you understand multiple positions at Google or Apple
If you want to work at one of the top tech companies, it helps to have at least a basic understanding of multiple positions in the organization. McDowell calls this being a Generalist.
On one hand this advice makes sense but on another many technical roles are not generalist positions.
Generally having a knowledge of the company’s structure and roles is going to look good to any interviewer, assuming you can get past the gatekeeper at the recruitment company.
Entrepreneurs have a better shot of being hired.
Good news: Your GPA doesn’t matter very much
Most people think tech companies, Google in particular, harp over candidates’ GPAs. McDowell says there is little truth to that rumor.
This is only good news if you’ve ticked most of the other boxes, which means you’ll be considered if you’re middling graduate from Stanford or Harvard but forget it if you went elsewhere, regardless of how good your marks are.
The danger of recruiters
What the Business Insider story really illustrates are the risks of relying on third party recruiters as gatekeepers to filter out new employees.
Regardless of how good the recruitment consultant is they are going to apply their own cultural filters and biases onto the selection process and as a result knock out most good candidates.
More importantly, a company risks developing a monoculture if the recruitment process is too effective at filtering out people who don’t fit a narrow stereotype.
A new breed of officemen?
Reading the Business Insider story leaves one with the feeling that many of these companies are beginning to look like IBM in the 1960s – monocultures more concerned about the colour of an employee’s tie and choice of shirts rather than the talents they bring to the organisation or the value they can add to customers.
This is probably the greatest risk of all to the tech industry, that they end up with an insular group of people with fixed mindsets.
Should that happen, then the wave of disruption Silicon Valley has unleashed on the world will end up being the industry’s undoing as smart kids working out of garages in Michigan or slums in Delhi will out innovate the staid, comfortable incumbents.
It’s also interesting to consider how many other industries are now suffering after several decades of similar recruiting practices where leading businesses are now dominated by insular, unworldly monocultures.