There are actually two overlapping long tail effects here: top schools and huge companies. Only one quadrant of this 2x2 grid works well for on-campus recruiting.
For everyone else, there’s a discoverability problem: it's hard for students to discover exciting startups, and it's hard for startups to get in front of and filter for the best young engineers.
It's not irrational for companies to hire from a small set of schools: there's just no other way they can effectively allocate resources. That's why there's opportunity for companies like Triplebyte and Interviewing.io to innovate in new ways of screening, and as a result, get more data and insight while making the process better for both engineers and companies. A similar example would be what we learned about bootcamps vs. recent college grads, which other companies couldn't have learned yet because they just reject the bootcamp grads as a broad heuristic: https://triplebyte.com/blog/bootcamps-vs-college
For everyone else, there’s a discoverability problem: it's hard for students to discover exciting startups, and it's hard for startups to get in front of and filter for the best young engineers.
It's not irrational for companies to hire from a small set of schools: there's just no other way they can effectively allocate resources. That's why there's opportunity for companies like Triplebyte and Interviewing.io to innovate in new ways of screening, and as a result, get more data and insight while making the process better for both engineers and companies. A similar example would be what we learned about bootcamps vs. recent college grads, which other companies couldn't have learned yet because they just reject the bootcamp grads as a broad heuristic: https://triplebyte.com/blog/bootcamps-vs-college