Most of the information out about this year’s 2L on-campus interviewing still seems to be in the form of anecdotes combined with wild speculation on the part of students. Some of the frustration at the top schools seems to be focused on the fact that they had just about as many employers on campus as usual and students interviewed more intensely than ever, yet many got exactly zero callbacks, and more got no summer job offers. Only a few employers dropped out for 2Ls, and a few more cut 3L OCI, but if anything, students had more interviews than in past years because they were told to bid more widely because of the poor job market.

 

The fact is that there are just many fewer jobs out there to be gotten. Now the (as far as I know) unfounded speculation comes in—that perhaps firms came to campus and gave callbacks having no intention of hiring nearly as many people as their callbacks indicated. That is, that it’s relatively inexpensive to bring a few extra people in for a callback, especially when firms realize that they thereby purchase a school’s goodwill, which firms will continue to want going forward.

 

The question I have to ask is what, if anything, could have been done and can be done going forward to avoid the frustration students went through this year. We blogged previously about the importance of bidding carefully, and the fact that doing so will probably lead to a more objectively successful job season. There are some ideas that have been floated in the past and are now finally getting some traction, like pushing back 2L interviewing to the late-winter or early spring so that firms have a better idea of their needs, and students have more time to show what they can do.

 

Other, more radical solutions have also been floating around among students. One that we’ll mention, not to endorse it but to play the devil’s advocate and perhaps start a discussion, is a pre-interview employer screening of résumés. It happens as a matter of course outside of the very top schools, and maybe it makes sense. One source of frustration was that people ended their summers early, either leaving jobs before they needed to or refraining from splitting the summer, to return to campus for interviews. When some of those students got no callbacks from the firms they had bid on (presumably the full range of firms at which they wanted to or would have been willing to work for), they felt that their time would have been better spent getting more work experience. Part of the problem stems from a myth that 1Ls are still often told (or get into their heads one way or another) at the top schools: that grades don’t matter once they get where they’ve gotten. From a student/anecdotal perspective, the fact is that, even with new, odd, vague grading systems, some firms will simply compare the transcripts of candidates at a school, and then decide among the top-graded students. We all like to think that firms just need to meet us to see the unique snowflake that we are, but that just won’t work, at least for certain firms. Maybe a pre-interview review can streamline the process: if a firm would never hire a particular candidate, the candidate may as well know that up front. Hopefully the lower-ranked firms would realize that the higher-grade students may well not end up with them even if those students bid, so the firms will widen their pool. Students will get a sense of where they fall and what their chances are, and can make an educated decision about whether to widen their search, and whether to return to campus for firm interviews at all if their targets markets and firms are going to bee too much of a long-shot.

 

Top schools think that they are protecting and helping their students with the non-screening policy, but they might do well to think about modifying the system, at least until the job market rebounds.