Also, some companies <i>do</i> do it that way and are widely decried as elitist for it.  I went to a pretty elite school, and every fall, companies like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Monitor Group, Bain Capital, etc. would descend upon campus.  They&#x27;d build relationships with professors, ask about who the top students in classes were, and oftentimes arrange private dinners with those students to get to know them.  Rumor on campus was that if you were a top 25% student in the econ department, you had a job waiting for you on Wall Street; if you weren&#x27;t, well, you had to fight for careers like everyone else.<p>Problem is, &quot;building personal relationships with promising talent&quot; doesn&#x27;t scale, and so the companies that do it have to pick who the promising talent is.  They usually do so through <i>other</i> markers of status (where you went to school, who you know, who your parents are, etc.), which just perpetuates existing inequalities.  Everybody thinks that they are the beautiful unique snowflake that hot companies will want to know, but when they find out that those beautiful unique snowflakes are <i>other</i> people, they cry foul.<p>(Interestingly, 3 of the 4 companies mentioned above imploded spectacularly, while companies with noticeably impersonal and impartial application processes - like Google or YCombinator, for example - are still going strong.  That might be an indication that the &quot;treat everybody as a cog, but at least treat them fairly&quot; approach tends to work better.)