Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs
Lauren A. Rivera
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 0691169276
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Americans are taught to believe that upward mobility is possible for anyone who is willing to work hard, regardless of their social status, yet it is often those from affluent backgrounds who land the best jobs. Pedigree takes readers behind the closed doors of top-tier investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms to reveal the truth about who really gets hired for the nation's highest-paying entry-level jobs, who doesn't, and why.
Drawing on scores of in-depth interviews as well as firsthand observation of hiring practices at some of America's most prestigious firms, Lauren Rivera shows how, at every step of the hiring process, the ways that employers define and evaluate merit are strongly skewed to favor job applicants from economically privileged backgrounds. She reveals how decision makers draw from ideas about talent--what it is, what best signals it, and who does (and does not) have it--that are deeply rooted in social class. Displaying the "right stuff" that elite employers are looking for entails considerable amounts of economic, social, and cultural resources on the part of the applicants and their parents.
Challenging our most cherished beliefs about college as a great equalizer and the job market as a level playing field, Pedigree exposes the class biases built into American notions about the best and the brightest, and shows how social status plays a significant role in determining who reaches the top of the economic ladder.
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Criteria—analytics, polish, drive, fit, and overall hiring recommendation (which was an independent score)—were listed next to the names. Double-clicking on a candidate’s name revealed each interviewer’s written comments; selecting the appropriate icon from a task bar led to the candidate’s résumé, transcript, referral history, and diversity status. The program allowed multiple users to see the interface simultaneously, but only one person could control it at a time. Even though none of us in the.
Express a greater desire to stay.40 Moreover, students from less affluent backgrounds tend to display greater psychological resilience and persistence in the face of stress, pressure, and adversity.41 These characteristics can be assets in coping with high-stress, deadline-driven, around-the-clock, competitive work environments such as those found in EPS firms. Students from less affluent backgrounds also are more likely to sacrifice personal desires for the sake of the group, a potential asset.
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Elite university students’ desires for high-status prizes in soliciting applications (see chapter 3), the best paths and values were those presented as having been guided by intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations.4 For instance, although firms prioritized individuals who participated in prestigious educational, extracurricular, and occupational activities, it was in a candidate’s interests to frame the pursuit of a high-status track in terms of decisions prompted by inner drives, loves, and.
Candidates’ cognitive skills, particularly their years of schooling.74 However, employers may also use the presence or absence of referrals to an organization and candidates’ gender and race to infer productivity.75 But crucially, as best guesses, these signals are imperfect and may result in suboptimal hiring decisions, or even discriminatory ones. Consequently, the dominant theory of hiring in sociology depicts employers’ decisions as driven by estimates of candidates’ human capital, social.