Are brand name orgs on your resume indicative of anything?

How useful is that Harvard degree?

People read that you’ve been with KPMG, Bain or McKinsey and are wowed. They also read that you’ve been with a venture capital firm – they are also wowed. They see that you’ve been educated (here, education is defined as having student status at any institution) at Ivy Leagues and they are wowed.

While I do not think that having Stanford or Cambridge on your résumé means you’re better (sorry, BL), I question the reason behind the general public being impressed by someone who has big brand names on their résumés. And I figured that the reason why over time these names confer a certain status onto that person, it was because it was a big deal getting into Ivies, or into those big firms last time (probably still is true now). Each of those brand name orgs do their due diligence when hiring and are very picky when it comes down to choosing who to take and who to discard. Each has their own set of criteria which the candidate must fulfil.

Some look for evidence of grades because to them, they might feel that one’s grades show how diligent the person is; or some look for leadership skills as evidenced by having led and managed groups of people. No matter what they look for, I’m pretty sure that not all of those heading these big orgs are idiots (=P). They still must be pretty excellent people themselves to have gotten there in the first place, so I trust that some of them are enlightened enough to know how to choose the right people and not just based on looking for other brand name orgs (aka trophies) on the candidates’ résumés.

Also, there’s so much more to just being recognized for certain qualities that you might have. Rather, there are reasons like networking and learning how exactly the mind of a VC works by watching them go about doing their due diligence to invest in a company. And in this situation, what way better but to try to get yourself into a top VC firm with a track record of success – so that you know that out of 10 startups that they invest in, perhaps one will be relatively successful and that you actually watched that process? Rather than join a not so well-known firm and helping them but in the end, all their efforts go down the drain cuz most of the companies they fund go bust. But I’m not saying that one should only go for top firms, rather, if one’s time is short and when one has something specific that one wants to learn, there are certain stuff that top firms can open up to you that lesser firms can’t. And I must also say that vice versa, one can only learn some stuff from smaller and less popular organizations.

So unfortunately, I feel that people these days don’t really know why at all brand name orgs are so sought after apart from the all-too-commonly-known reason as prestige. But what’s behind that? Much too blinded, they fail to realize that it’s so much more. And that the reason behind people trying so hard to get into top consulting firms could be much more strategic than simply collecting trophies.

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