College Admissions

My first two jobs in high school were at a local company here in Cleveland — Progressive Insurance.

Both of my jobs were not impressive. They were the very definition of entry level. The first was after my freshman year of high school, I would load and unload magnetic disks when a screen told me to do so in a basement for 8 hours a day with a 30 minute lunch break. That’s right — seven and a half hours of loading computer discs. Yes it is as bad as it sounds.

That was better than the second job which was refilling printer toner. The printer toner did not come in a plastic cartridge. It came in a flexible plastic bag that had over a gallon of tiny particles that flowed like milk. You would cut open the top of the bag and pour it into the printer. Needless to say there was not a week that went by without part of the day cleaning up printer toner.

Neither of those jobs required interviews. I got them like everyone did. You had a parent who worked for the company. The jobs paid minimum wage. This seemed like a hiring process well suited to the degree of difficulty.

At every other job I have worked, it was not possible to get hired without an interview. And in many cases it is arguably the single most important aspect of the hiring process. Many of those jobs would have many interviews over many rounds.

At the final place I worked full-time, Amazon, nearly 20 years into my career, I was finally taught how interviews should work.

Let me share a single difference of how hiring worked at Amazon.

The person with the final say over hiring a specific candidate was not the hiring manager (which is the way it worked at every other company I had ever worked at). It was someone from a different part of the company who held a certification as a bar raiser. Bar raisers had completed at least 500 interviews. To become a bar raiser you had to complete the minimum number of interviews, complete extra training and were shadowed by a senior bar raiser before you were allowed to work on your own.

While everyone voted on whether to hire a candidate or not, you could not hire a person without the bar raisers approval. The bar raiser was there to make sure every candidate met the Amazon minimums before you could hire them for your department. This avoided the classic problem of a hiring manager hiring all their friends right after they themselves were hired.

I and nearly everyone I know and people who have written books on Amazon believes how seriously Amazon took this process is one of the key reasons they were able to develop such a successful company. There was both diversity in hires and a clear bar that only passed those who were ready for the challenge.

It is the beginning of college season in our household. Our eldest is in the middle of junior year busily cranking away on his classes, clubs and independent study.

As I learn more about the college process, it has undergone many changes since I went through 34 years ago. Many, or even most, these changes are good ideas.

One change that sticks out as a less obvious decision is the college admissions process has no interviews whatsoever.

Can you imagine any top company hiring people without an interview?

Furthermore, can you imagine solely hiring based on an online application and some 3rd party letters?

It would never happen for a lot of obvious reasons.

Obviously, the system is what it is but when an entire industry varies so differently from the way a process works in the rest of the economy it makes you wonder.