“Someone with a degree is better than a person who doesn’t have one” Does it sound familiar to you? This article doesn’t try to give bad advice about school and definitely we don’t want to lead anybody to drop out of it, even when we think a degree is not always necessary (…if you want to be a doctor better stop reading this!).
Laszlo Bock, Human Resources Vicepresident at Google believes that academic record is useless (The New York Times). A company famous because of asking all its candidates a brilliant academic record, has changed the rules in the hiring model. Unless you have finished school recently, Google and probably much more big enterprises won´t ask for any kind of certificate.
“Succeeding in academia isn’t always a sign of being able to do a job”… as the same as Laszlo, we think the ability to process on the fly is most valuable than Intelligent Quotient. Coding is not easy, and beyond asking for a degree, the tech world needs people ready to act in case of an unexpected issue. That guy who dropped out of school but has launched his own app, or has learned in his own way how to code deserves to be considered by a good company to join them.
Did you know that in Mexico, there´s a new kind of school called Dev.f where people learn to solve real problems using software, having or NOT academic experience? This is quite too far from the traditional college or conventional school. Dev.f thinking is similar to “why to wait to go to college when you can get the knowledge right away while you are lead by experts in the area” (Eme Morato #CPMX6).
We aren’t trying to say that having a degree or that the best GPA in world is not important, of course the ones who have made an effort to outstand in school are awesome too, but those two agents shouldn´t be the main deal when hiring someone. An important thing is to catch talented people, it doesn’t matter if they finished school or not, or if we hire a lawyer that went to Dev.f and decided to focus on software development.
That´s why, we suggest to change the way of interviewing candidates and to opt for a behavioral based job interview, which can offer hiring managers the possibility of getting responses related to the character of the person and experience. In a behavioral interview you might ask how people have reacted to a particularly difficult problem in the past. It can also help companies to find people who fit the company’s definition of leadership.
Laszlo said that the interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and drill into that, you get two kinds of information. The first one is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the other is the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate in a sense of what they consider to be difficult.
At ScreenIT, we certainly believe that talent exist in so many places, according to that, our hiring managers and most of our clients not only rely on an academic degree or school´s names, our clients have also shown interest in the way people are able to make their own way in the world. ScreenIT cares much about people and their experience including the logic to solve the unexpected.
So, the question here is unsolved… Degree or not degree? It depends on each person. The truth is that if you opt for college, you should be clear on what you want to get by the time you finish school… in the other hand, hiring processes need to be updated to the next level. Share with us: What has been your experience hiring talents with/without a degree? Have you had any issues related to academic record when someone pretends to hire you?
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(Image: gocollege.com)
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