This is a definitely widely debated topic. At some point or other, leaders would have asked themselves if they are being biased over hiring PMs based on their college pedigree.
My take is this –
At senior levels – relevant experience, skills, and performance in past roles are all that matters. After all, there would be only a handful of candidates that fit the exact profile and experience required of the role. But there are some senior positions where recruiters advertise that they are looking for candidates only from top colleges. This is signaling from the management to the board or investors – that they have hired a high-caliber candidate for the role. If the board or the investors were to be deeply involved in the recruitment process, this signaling using college pedigree is not required.
At the entry/junior level hiring, the whole game is different. There would be too many identical resumes. Also as a hiring manager, you are flexible about the relevance of the experience of the candidates.
Imagine interviewing some 100 candidates for first-level screening. The amount of time and resources required to do that would simply exhaust you. As a hiring manager, you need to optimize for the time you spend on the hiring process. This is where educational pedigree & GPA helps.
Taking an extreme example – let us say you only have 2 sets of resumes – Tier 1 college resumes vs Tier 3 college resumes.
If in the Tier-1 set, you may have to interview say 4 candidates to hire the 1 suitable candidate, you would probably require to interview 10 (or could be more) candidates from the tier-3 set. A similar argument can be made with GPAs as well. Once the shortlisting is made, then the outcome of interviews + reference checks matter, and haven’t seen anywhere college pedigree/GPA are being used to make the final offer decision.
Note: The numbers and ratios above are representations to drive home the point and not based on any empirical research.
It is possible that the best PM candidate in the whole country is from a Tier-3 school and even has a poor GPA, but then the effort required to identify that wonderful candidate without signaling is quite enormous.
So using signals from the resume – educational pedigree and GPA – for first-level shortlisting is not a bad idea.
