UJM: All the big law firms and most investment banks use a combination of personal interviews at law schools, referrals legal headhunters etc. to screen their potential hires. Very few actually come through emailed resumes. Students are hired as “summer associates” after first and second year of law school and the large percentage of 1Ls and 2Ls are offered permanent positions contingent on their passing the bar exam. The upper tier of investment and commercial banks use similar referral and interview techniques and are increasingly bypassing MBAs and instead looking for really smart young men and women with diverse backgrounds and good quant skills and train them internally. I suspect, given your background, you are more familiar with hiring in the tech sector but I’m told that they increasingly use AI and headhunters to screen job candidates but DO verify both academic and prior employment resume claims before extending an offer.
I agree with you entirely that most resumes “inflate’ prior job experience but I very much doubt that many applicants would lie about where they have earned a degree or knowingly list “Yenavelt University” with the expectation of a job offer from a top firm. I have seen instances where a lateral hire conflates one of the many “executive study programs” offered by top business schools with a “graduate degree” from those schools, but not aware where we ever extended an offer to such an applicant.
I’m most impressed by some of the newest very new high tech and social media firms that could care less about pedigrees, graduate school reputation and seem to have the ability to identify really talented individuals, some with just high school diplomas, and they turn out to be rock stars in their respective fields.
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