Recruiters Rank Top 200 Universities: What a Load of Crap

My friend and fellow recruiting blogger, Jim Stroud, posted an article earlier this week that contains a list of the top 200 universities worldwide as ranked by recruiters. Thankfully Jim didn’t indicate his agreement with the list or even that such a list is relevant to anyone who is actually recruiting at universities.
Jim is a smart guy and a great recruiter so I trust that he understands that how one organization’s recruiters rank a school bears little relationship to how that school will or should be ranked by another organization’s recruiters. Let me explain.

Let’s say that you’re a recruiter for Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Your primary interest are students and recent graduates with strong customer service, sales, and leadership qualities. You’re going to focus your efforts on schools that turn out the most of those students. But what if you’re the Internal Revenue Service? Sure you’re going to want to recruit students with strong customer service and leadership qualities (who doesn’t?) but you’re unlikely to be looking as hard at those with great sales credentials as you are at those with a strong accounting or finance background. So Enterprise and IRS recruiters will rank schools differently not because one organization has great recruiters and the other doesn’t but because the recruiters for both organizations understand their needs and those needs differ.
Whenever we talk with a client who asks us for a list of the “best engineering schools” or “top colleges for finance majors,” we remind them that what makes a top school for one employer makes for a terrible school for another.