Selective independants

[poppydoppy]

Do they look better on League tables because the standard of teaching is better or just because they select the children most likely to do well?

You'd have to be a pretty shitty recruiter to filter on Oxbridge from CVs of experienced adult professionals. I certainly wouldn't, and I went to Oxbridge, it doesn't mean much tbh.

The difference is more in immediate opportunities while still at Uni, i.e. there will generally be more and better careers events for well-paid jobs at Oxbridge than say Leeds.

Can you expand a little on that seeker?

And there's be a deal of logic in favouring applicants who didn't go to expensive fee-paying schools also, since those from a failing state schoould would have risen to the top rather than merely floated along on a see of nepotism and privilege.

It really beats me why those reading that post can't see that I meant Oxford and Cambridge undergraduate degrees are a good. That's not the same as an exclusive filter. On the whole I'm talking about recent graduates anyhow in a setting where they do need to be bright.

Happy to. Saying that first flagging Oxbridge candidates because somehow they are uniquely bright is depressing.

Saying "so many graduates are clever so there is not much point ploughing through 1000 CVs fom an ex poly where most people are not very bright o find the one pearl among the swine as it were when you can limit your pool to a few good universities" is just fucking heartbreaking.

But I don't know why I engage with Xenia- she is so obviously a wind up merchant. It can't be lack of brain because I went to a good university.......it must be that my contact with the "dregs" has pulled me down.

We are talking about graduate type jobs here and recruiters who definitely do have a list of a few preferred universities which is likely to have on it Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Bristol and a few others too. They just do not have the resources to look too much more widely. However 10 years into your career when you are the leader in your field it is not likely to matter much at all where you went although it stillc an count. I was checking out a small company for someone last week and one of the things we looked at to see if they were a scam, what they said they were, sensible was the career history on linked in, any gaps, any fake degrees (the week before I found someone with one you buy for £10 over the internet for example) and this chap had gone to an ex poly and with the other bits that did not sound too right and his partner who had been at a university supposedly but for a strange period of time, well it did look a bit strange and the co-operation did not proceed.

If you are looking for trainee quants, then yes that would make sense.

But for most jobs the correlation won't be that great, but more importantly you would generally be looking for the best individual candidates, not recruiting an entire graduating cohort, so filters are generally not that wise.

Yoni I suspect your experience is atypical. For many of my contemporaries (and, no shadow of a doubt, for me) having Cambridge on the CV did mean something. It didn't mean everything. But it didn't mean nothing. The discussion above was about gradate trainees so I'm not entirely sure why you would raise the spectre of experienced adult professionals - but I would point out that for me Cambridge was a definite positive on my CV for some years after qualification. It's probably irrelevant now. But frankly, at this point having my own teeth has assumed more importance than I ever thought it would - I seem to have seamlessly moved from 'bit young' to 'is she still alive' almost overnight.

(It's possible I am over exaggerating my decrepitude but I feel OLD today).

Lol @ xenia refusing to deal with graduate from ex-poly.

I made a brand new shiny will on Friday Russians, in a sudden access of gloom.

seeker you really are poor at reading, but I can't help you on that. Blimey though, you don't half twist.

It might be helpful if you suggest at what stage one ignores credentials on a CV. Ignore quality of university? Class of degree? A Level grades? GCSE grades? Should it only be done by which candidate grew up on a council estate? Do we grade council estates? More interestingly what happens in the next generation when the disadvantaged parent earns ample to advantage his child? It's a bit shallow, all this.

In technology (my sector) of course it is easier to be more open-minded, as we could run through thousands of graduates who had the minimum requirements (a 2:1 in a science/IT/maths degree) through very tough tests in large centres.

Then we could do interviews for the rest. I believe this is still common practice for many, including large giants like IBM. For something like law it would be harder to do that, I guess?

I think the technology sector tends to be less "snobby" in general anyway, or so I am told by comparing notes with people in other sectors!!

Yellowtip- which bit did I misunderstand? You said you flag Oxbridge. Xenia said there's no point looking at CVs from "ex polys"

Is that not a pretty depressing outlook?

PS Just to qualify what I said earlier, we never flagged Oxbridge on a CV but I noticed that out of the handful of graduates we selected each year, there was a number of Oxbridge graduates that had come through. Interestingly one of them told me that he had got rejected by Accenture as they thought he was "too academic" so it depends what the interviewer is looking for on the day - it can be very subjective....

Yes but she's talking about young graduates yoni.

Young people in their early twenties who pretty much have been to school, university then law school (a lot of them won't even have done that yet, applying as many do, in advance).

So of course where they went to university and what they studied there, takes on more significance than it does years down the road. And no, a degree from an ex polly won't be enough to make the cut in many a law firm's training program.

That's not because there are't good candidates from those places, but simply because there are thousands of applicants and no business has enough time to interview everyone (DH and rusians have to spend their time fee earning, not interviewing). So you have initial filters.

But seeker with the best will in the world, DH doesn't have time to interview everyone.

And the fact is, you're more likely to find a keeper from Oxbridge than Leeds Met.

In terms of academically competitive jobs, or academic jobs, I'm struggling to see why grades and university shouldn't count seeker. I really don't find what Xenia depressing. It's realistic, that's all. You'd have to be a pretty shitty recruiter if you ignored all that.

Of course he doesn't have time to interview everybody. But he should have a better filtering mechanism that "Oxbridge? You're in"

It's not the 1920s!

You really are saying "Poor? Working class? Don't bother" I am sorry to hear that from you, in particular, wordfactory..

I too was involved with graduate recruitment to an International company and we did a first sift on a combination of academics, GCSEs, A levels, (predicted) degree class as well as evidence of outside activities, work experience and positions of responsibility etc. That did tend to push through Oxbridge applicants more than say non RG unis simply because they were the ones with the academic results that got them into Oxbridge in the first place Then the main process was based on identifying evidence they had ability and personal qualities in 8 main areas we had researched to be important to success in the organisation, 4 personal and 4 intellectual, through psychological testing, role playing and team exercises, case studies and interviews. Clearly the way someone talked or dressed (within reason) did not count as evidence of anything. At that stage it was very much about personal qualities and the graduates we took on were a complete cross section, we didn't engineer diversity but we did monitor it and on the whole achieved it. It's quite a common model for recruitment and used in DHs bank.

I completely disagree with Russians on international outlook having lived and worked in as well as studied a different culture, one perfectly capable of delivering shitty experiences as well as being fascinating. I have watched representatives of UKPLC operating there with an utter ignorance and disregard for the culture that put them at a serious disadvantage (including David Cameron). On the whole I think that lawyers and bankers, having to get involved in intense high stakes negotiation, quickly learn the skills they need to operate but I always felt like I was operating with one hand tied behind my back. Though I aimed to be culturally sensitive I realised after studying that culture deeply back in the UK that I had nethertheless been looking at everything from a western perspective, and it was a bit of a road to Damascus. I would approach my job quite differently now, but then I found it all so fascinating I have never really gone back to the day job

The graduates who emerge from my uni really do understand the cultures they hope to work in and do very well in the job market, including women to practise law in the Middle East, having been taught by some excellent role models. My DDs though having spent formative years in another culture just don't even need to engage with the issue intellectually. They are totally adept at operating within different cultures and both have a multicultural group of friends, they don't see themselves as "British" but global. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid

I do think from experience and our outreach activities that this is one area in which state schools have a way to go. When we came back from overseas the indies were falling over themselves to make it clear that they really valued the DDs overseas experience, the state schools were entirely disinterested, though perhaps that was because they knew we wouldn't get a place as late applicants. Candidates from state schools to our uni tend not to have quite such strong applications in terms of their curiosity about the culture, and it doesn't have to be a gap yah, or travelling with the rents, reading books and newspapers can demonstrate equal intellectual curiosity. Ironically some of the schools we visit are very multicultural, I suppose if the schools are not encouraging them and equipping them to make university applications, it is far too much to hope it would be opening their eyes to the prospect of studying another culture. My point is demonstrated by the phenomenon of Mandarin teaching in schools, lots jumped on the bandwagon far outstripping the supply of good teachers, and then many jumped off it again. Few schools have robust strategies in place for effective teaching of Mandarin, and most of those are indies.

The lack of opportunity to study MFL in state schools, our local comp plans to offer none at A would certainly hamper state school applicants to DH's bank as they require a knowledge of 2 languages, at least one to speaking standard.

Finally, sorry very long winded word factory I have worked extensively with banks and law firms and I really do think the overnighter thing is 70% to do with culture, 30% need. Decent project planning and business management skills, albeit as much on the client side, really can reduce the need for all those long hours. When my friend persuaded her fellow partners to let her go part time she met with huge resistance, and yet her clients had no problem and her chargeable hours were amongst the highest in the partnership. It wasn't the demands of the job that drove her into the public sector, it was the attitudes of her fellow partners which were largely the result of the fact that putting your head down and getting the job done 9-6 wasn't valued in their cultural paradigm. I accept city law firms are running very tightly but at least one of my peers can routinely be seen at the station at 11am, just because he chooses a 12 hour day that ends at 11pm, it scarcely seems fair to inflict that on others in his department. My DH is at that station at 7am so at least he sees his DDs before bedtime, but don't get me on the long term impact of that culture and those hours..... .

Really gone on here but you touched a few nerves

Don't be silly seeker it's not Oxbridge and you're in.

But an upper second from Oxbridge in a decent subject would be enough to get you through the first round of filters. As would Bristol, or Exeter, or Durham, or Wawick, or Yale, or Harvard...

Not the right degree and not the right place means you get folitered out first, that's all.

Sorry seeker didn't see your comment about poor and WC.

Look, it's not that anyone wants to exclude those from poor WC backgrounds. DH and I both come from WC backgrounds and I was very poor.

But applicants have to be able to demonstrate on paper that they're clever enough for the job at bare basics.
So how do you do that if you went to an ex polly?

Seeker, while you continue to comment on how annoyed with yourself you are for letting some of what Xenia says get to you, please be assured that I am equally as annoyed with myself for letting your continued refusal to acknowledge that poor and working class people can and do go to Cambridge and probably Oxford, get to me.

You and Xenia are two sides of the same coin. Both with demonstrably flawed idées fixe which you never tire of trotting out. Nothing Yellow or Word have said in this subsection of the thread is either inaccurate or offensive.

I'm also going to say somehting now, that might be controversial...and posters no doubt will tell me if I'm wrong, but the way Oxbridge teach, which is quite unique in the UK, is probably a very good stamping ground for commercial law.

Seeing it again, up close, all these years after I attended as a student, I can appreciate how very rigorous it is. That in depth analysis. That in yer face-ness of tutes.

And it's intense. Which again replicates to some degree, a career in the law.

Do you mean because of the supervision/tutorial system in Cambridge and Oxford respectively word? I am inclined to agree that could be good preparation. Or something less tangible?