The days when wearing your Harvard pin to a job interview gave you a leg up are apparently over.
Business leaders who responded to a Gallup survey shrugged off a candidate's college as a critical factor in giving someone a copy of the washroom key.
Gallup spoke to 623 corporate honchos, asking them what factors were most important in the hiring process. The results are encouraging, as these men and women of industry said knowledge and skill sets were what they looked for first and second.
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A candidate's college major came in a distant third in the "very important" category, and where someone graduated from barely registered.
Here are the numbers for factor considered "very important":
- Amount of knowledge candidate has in field: 84 percent
- Candidate's applied skills in field: 79 percent
- Candidate's college major: 28 percent
- College graduated from: 9 percent
However, job seekers' expectations may be out of line with this business-leader thinking. Here's what Gallup had to say about how the "average American" perceives these factors:
"About eight in 10 U.S. adults say that knowledge and applied skills in the field are very important to managers making hiring decisions for organizations. The average American, however, rates the candidate's college major and where the candidate received his or her degree as higher in importance than business leaders do.
"Nearly half of U.S. adults (47 percent) say the candidate's college or university major is a very important factor to hiring managers, and 30 percent say where the candidate received his or her college degree is very important."
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Dan Cook
Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.
