Firms should hire based on aptitude, not varsity degrees

Opinion and Analysis

Graduands during a graduation ceremony at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. PHOTO | FILE 

By CAROL MUSYOKA

There is nothing more daunting to a weekly columnist than a deadline hanging over one’s head and a dearth of excuses as all reasonable explanations have been utilised in the past.

So I am just going to dive into an article I stumbled on The Huffington Post UK that demonstrates potential disruption in future hiring strategies.

Penned by Lucy Sherriff, the article is titled “Ernst & Young Removes Degree Classification From Entry Criteria As There’s No Evidence University Equals Success”.

It goes without saying that anyone reading that will sit up and pay attention as Ernst & Young (EY) is one of the big four global accounting firms and, according to the article, the fifth largest recruiter of graduates in the United Kingdom.

What has EY figured out that the rest of us haven’t? According to the article, Maggie Stilwell, EY’s managing partner for talent, said the company would use online assessments to judge the potential of applicants.

“Academic qualifications will still be taken into account and indeed remain an important consideration when assessing candidates as a whole, but will no longer act as a barrier to getting a foot in the door,” she said.

“Our own internal research of over 400 graduates found that screening students based on academic performance alone was too blunt an approach to recruitment. It found no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken.”

In addition to the quickly forgotten aviation college scandal, our back street forgers continue to churn out Nobel Prize-winning copies of degrees that are bandied about loosely by job applicants.

Delinquent university students brazenly get their dissertations and assignments written for a fee by academic hustlers, arriving at a degree that is part figment of the imagination, part luck and a whole lot of balderdash that will only be uncovered after the same delinquent student is mistakenly hired.

Frankly speaking, I have always wondered what it is that a university degree adds to a potential hire for a non-professional job. By non-professional I mean lawyer, doctor, engineer, architect, accountant and the like.

In my former banking life, I worked with colleagues that were chemical engineers, doctors, civil engineers, computer scientists, art majors and political scientists, among several other varieties of non-banking related degrees.

You see, there is no such thing as a Bachelor of Banking degree. You just had to be numerate, literate and fortunate to land a degree in what was and still is perceived as a lucrative industry.

It is only in the last 15 years when a degree became a minimum entry requirement into many of the banks. In Barclays particularly, I worked with many colleagues who had joined the bank straight after their A-levels.

They were smart, experienced and highly professional individuals who had learnt everything about banking in exactly the same way that I, with my university degree, had learnt – by asking questions, by being given tasks, by making (horrendous and expensive) mistakes and by being sent for in-house training.

Most importantly, they had one thing that I didn’t: institutional memory and good instincts that came from years of experience. No university can teach you that.