Recruiting at 'Elite' Colleges Won't Improve Your Cybersecurity, But This Will

There they go again. 

According to The Wall Street Journal last week, recruiters are going back to recruiting at 'elite' colleges. And of course not just 'elite' colleges but, you know, the right 'elite' colleges. 

Here is how bad this has become (original behind paywall):

"The hiring trend for new graduates resembles recruiting practices before the pandemic and the tight labor market of 2018 and 2019...Most [firms] now only recruit at up to 30 American colleges out of about 4,000, starting with top-ranked schools and then looking at local universities...If you fall outside of those two categories? 'God help you,' [the recruiter] added."

"God help you"? Wow. 

Why not recruit this way for cybersecurity? Because entry-level cybersecurity technicians all must have the same qualifications so candidate from the right 'elite' colleges have the same qualifications as those from the not-right-elite colleges and so on.

(Note: we're here to discuss the value of recruiting for entry-level cybersecurity technicians. Whatever value there is in recruiting for other roles is immaterial to this post.)

Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose a company only recruits cybersecurity candidates from One, and only one, Specific Right 'Elite' College. How would recruiters pick from among these candidates?

The best answer to this question, and to the question of broadening the aperture to recruiting anywhere, is what we do at Pythia Cyber: focus on cybersecurity talent.

Talent is defined by Conchie & Dalton as "A measurable, innate characteristic that a person demonstrates consistently in order to achieve high performance. Talents are strictly defined. A person who has a strong measure in a specific talent will perform predictably better in tasks related to that talent." You know what talent is when you think about your coworkers, the people in your team, and your peer executives: you don't think about the problems they solve or the discoveries they make based on where they went to college.

You think about them in terms of their capacities and interests and work styles. These are all facets of talent. 

Talent is independent of where someone went to college, let alone whether it was the right versus wrong 'elite' university. 

In recruiting you're looking to back-fill an open position with someone similar to the previous incumbent because the mantra in behavioral science is “past behavior predicts future behavior.” When your recruiter only looks at the right 'elite' university, the talent pool is highly restricted. In this typical model, you're not looking at an individual's talent, you're saying that you don't know what talent is or are unwilling to measure it.

There is nothing wrong with establishing recruiting relationships with the right 'elite' universities as long as there is awareness of the talent you need and how the aperture may need to be broadened to find the talent beyond that source.

Does your recruiting function have a broad enough aperture? Does it understand the talent you need is more important than the name of the university on the diploma?

Ask us how we can work with you to recruit for talent, not alma maters.

(picture attribution: Diliff - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42693401)