Article: How important is uni prestige?

Pages: start of 32- end of 33
http://www.highfliers.co.uk/download/2015/graduate_market/GMReport15.pdf

No. In the longer term the uni, if anything, becomes even less important. It will be your ongoing work performance (and expertise) that is MUCH more important.

And I suspect your mum would agree.

What industry does she hire for?

Posted from TSR Mobile

Maybe, but the jobs market is very competitive and I suspect any edge you can get on competitors is helpful and she says that certain companies recruiting for top actuarial/lawyer jobs insist on RG. That's just what she says, that's all I know, maybe she's wrong but I trust a professional recruiter who I know more than prospective students, students or other ex-students on this forum (no offence intended). Maybe she's wrong, but I don't massively mind where I go anyway.

Maybe, but the jobs market is very competitive and I suspect any edge you can get on competitors is helpful and she says that certain companies recruiting for top actuarial/lawyer jobs insist on RG. That's just what she says, that's all I know, maybe she's wrong but I trust a professional recruiter who I know more than prospective students, students or other ex-students on this forum (no offence intended). Maybe she's wrong, but I don't massively mind where I go anyway.

I really don't think outside of Oxbridge and potentially LSE and imperial that this is a thing tbh. I think it's oxbridge's membership that is skewing things.

The RG within itself is super variable and your friend is just one recruiter.

I have a non RG degree and got offers from 4 top law firms for vac schemes and/or training contracts. I have a good degree, a strong academic record, I interview fairly well, I have tons of work experience and I'm pretty sure that's why I did well in that respect. A lot of people even from Oxbridge get rejected at app form stage for these jobs.

I think the RG thing is simply a confound and people need to get over it.

That's paywalled, I can't see it.

Bad news for students who have spent too much time in the library: PwC is removing candidates' academic results from the final stage of law-graduate recruitment .To get a law graduate job at PwC candidates had to jump through all the usual hoops including an online personality questionnaire, video interview, group activity and face-to-face interview with senior team members.But at the final stage, the accounting firm hid the candidates' test scores and academic transcripts from interviewers to remove any unconscious bias ."It's a good idea because as a candidate I had a lot more to offer than just my marks," said Macquarie University student Jana Kiriazidis, one of just eight candidates out of 600 applicants who landed a law-graduate job at PwC .

However, she concedes the practice could disadvantage people who have good marks and spent a lot of time studying.She said the process worked in her favour because she was an all-rounder: she had done an internship at Cochlear, worked as a legal assistant and was a keen soccer player.The recruitment policy also better reflected the nature of the role at PwC, she said. "It's about building relationships with clients, it's not about sitting at a desk."PwC legal partner Tim Blue said blacking out academic transcripts at the final stage of the interview helped the firm to get a good mix of candidates from diverse universities and academic disciplines.

"We know that our people need to have excellent business and commercial acumen, not just be brilliant lawyers, and that's why we didn't want to just go with the candidates with the highest score," he said.The candidates still had to meet the minimum academic standard to get to the final stage of the interview.Under the leadership of Tony O'Malley and Mr Blue, both former King & Wood Mallesons managing partners, PwC is aggressively hiring lawyers in plans to double its legal practice over the next two years.'BLIND CV' ON THE RISE
PwC is not the only firm that is moving towards a "blind policy" to weed out unconscious bias from the graduate recruitment process. Four years ago, KWM introduced a blind CV process which removes name, address, gender and school from the initial graduate recruitment screening process.In addition to removing unconscious bias based on high school and postcode, this has the effect of concealing the candidate's ethnicity and potential family connection to prominent lawyers.King & Wood Mallesons head of people and development Kathryn Bellion said the blind process was successful in removing an interviewer's affinity bias."This bias leads us to favour people who are similar to ourselves, for example, [those] who live in the same suburb as us, went to the same school etc. We remove this information and therefore the likelihood of affinity bias occurring.

"Decision-making should then be more focused on the candidate's relevant experience, skills and technical ability," Ms Bellion said.The law firm uses the blind policy for graduate recruitment in some cities, but Ms Bellion said that it plans to expand it to other areas of recruitment over time.Law graduate employment levels remain at their worst on record, with nearly one in four graduates still looking for full-time work four months after graduation. Even some of the legal industry's brightest minds have said they are not pushing their children to follow their footsteps and enter the legal industry.No more than two candidates came from the same university. In contrast, when Mr Blue was a law graduate half his graduate cohort came from Sydney University and the other half from UNSW."We wanted to treat them as equal and not base the decision on what law school we [the interviewers] went to."He said it helped the firm to pick candidates who were commercially savvy.Ms Kiriazidis is among the first batch of law graduates for PwC as the big four accounting firms aggressively hire lawyers to take a chunk out of the legal services market.


Read more: http://www.afr.com/business/legal/academic-transcripts-blanked-out-for-pwc-graduate-recruitment-20150830-gjbc78#ixzz3ywr6Xeck
Follow us: @FinancialReview on Twitter | financialreview on Facebook

According to my mum (who's opinion on the matter was what i was referring to), it doesnt necessarily matter for training or vac schemes or even most jobs, but for very 'high-up' jobs in law and finance where SOME companies don't consider those who dont have an RG (or, at least, 'good uni') degree.

Copied/Pasted

I think you might be forgetting a small thing: confounds

I'm not saying that what you say is one hundred per cent not true but a lot of it seems a bit generalised.

Personally I have yet to apply for graduate jobs purely on the basis that even by my late twenties, every job I have wanted to do has just happened to be non graduate.

I think it's very linear to work on the basis of "go to rg uni, walk into great graduate job with ease, sorted". It is my belief that no matter what the job is, sometimes it takes a killer covering letter and being mad enough to do it that gets you in the door. For example many graduate jobs require you to live away from home and this can diminish their appeal. I'm not saying graduate jobs aren't great, maybe they are, but either way it will take more than a rg uni to get someone the job on the basis that employers want to know stuff that doesn't relate: where are you based? Do you seem keen to stay with the company? Do we think we can get on with each other in the workplace etc?. A rg uni on the cv is not an invincibility cloak if you can't assure potential employers of other things.

You seem to be forgetting the fact there are surveys that measure employers' intentions and preferences and on those, RG universities still win.

They of course may prefer RG graduates because they generally have a higher ability in most everything, but this reputation formed by the graduates has in turn make it easier for RG graduates to get higher paying jobs. The question I responded to was how I made the claim that employers prefer RG graduates. When both their behaviour and intentions stated that they do prefer RG graduates, there really is no other way to argue against this.

I never focused on graduate jobs. I focused on the employment rate as well as the salary - on both fronts, RG universities do better. They also do better on surveys eliciting preferences from employers.

You're just desperately rationalizing this. Employers clear prefer and do prefer RG graduates, and there is no ambiguity here. So what if you need other things to be hired? Are you saying that RG graduates are generally reluctant to stay with the company? Generally not based around the company? All of the factors you mentioned have no correlation to the university you graduated from, and so can happen to anyone. On the basis of university alone, being from an RG university does help. No-one is saying you can get hired ever if you are in a coma just on the strength of your Oxford degree 30 years ago.

You seem to be forgetting the fact there are surveys that measure employers' intentions and preferences and on those, RG universities still win.

They of course may prefer RG graduates because they generally have a higher ability in most everything, but this reputation formed by the graduates has in turn make it easier for RG graduates to get higher paying jobs. The question I responded to was how I made the claim that employers prefer RG graduates. When both their behaviour and intentions stated that they do prefer RG graduates, there really is no other way to argue against this.