By Ash Arumugam
Cornell University fosters an environment that is characterized by coffee chats, interview preparation, and professional services and activities. Universities across the country breed students that study business, accounting, economics, and mathematics with the eventual goal of being able to accept full-time offers to prestigious consulting firms, banks, and law firms. Beyond just excelling in academics, these motivated young adults have to perfect the art of interviewing. Recruits must successfully “wow” interviewers through multiple rounds in order to have a chance of making six-figure salaries at the age of 23. Not only do these interviews have behavioral and technical questions, but firms look for someone who is able to “mesh” with the culture of the firm. This process of cultural matching between recruits, employers and companies is meant to pair with the existing social nature of the company and the people who work there but instead works to exacerbate the gatekeeping of prestigious occupations to only a certain demographic of people.
It is human nature to connect with strangers over similar interests and experiences. In the latter rounds of interviews, recruiters look for commonalities in essentially lifestyles to determine, regardless of a candidate’s skills and credentials, if they are deserving of an offer. This is an issue because structural factors, like social class, race, and gender, heavily influence one’s experiences and cultural background. In one study, more than half of 120 evaluators interviewed said that cultural fit was the most important criterion in determining if a candidate would get the job or not. This trumps analytical thinking and communicative skills, which heavily favors recruits who have simply played the “right” sports or read the “right” books. Cultural upbringing is highly dependent on familial socioeconomic decisions: what kind of high school did candidates go to, what activities were they involved in after school, and where did parents travel to during the holidays? The cultivation of leisure time is an idea that is fostered by the white upper middle class that requires large commitments of both time and money. This is a luxury that is either not economically feasible for many families or is simply just not part of the culture of many communities of color.
This cultural gap between potential recruits and their interviewers furthers the lack of diversity in prestigious occupations like venture capital, investment banking, and private equity. It is substantially more difficult for people of color and women to establish enough similarities to convince their overwhelmingly white, affluent, male, Ivy-League-educated recruiters that they possess the backgrounds and experiences to be a “perfect fit” in their company.
This idea of a “perfect fit” automatically denies many people with diverse backgrounds and upbringings and phenomenal skills and intellect the opportunity to break into an extremely select arena. Law firms, consulting companies, and banks should reevaluate how the criteria they use to decide which candidates are “good enough” for them when their idea of “good” is synonymous to exclusivity.