From Exclusive to Inclusive: A Short History of Status
The highest possible status used to be essentially associated to the institution or company that recruited you. The more selective the club, the higher the status.
Typically the race to higher status would start with your university (or rather long before, but let’s start there): you would compete to enter the most selective one, and derive prestige and status from it. “Harvard College accepts record low of 5.8% to the class of 2017”, the press reported 2 years ago, but “with a 5.69% admissions rate for the 2017 class, Stanford is slightly more selective than Harvard”. So strangely enough, to be most attractive as a ‘status’ school you must be most selective, which is why these universities are in a competition over who accepts the LOWEST percentage of applicants.
The real value created by ‘status’ universities is not education, the quality of their teachers or any of the things they put forward on their websites, but how they eliminate the highest number of applicants. The value is in the funnel.
The race to high status would then continue with the company that would recruit you. To quantify your status, you would have to determine whether Goldman Sachs is more selective that Morgan Stanley or the other way around (there’s a 2% acceptance rate in each, but they always bicker over who has the lowest rate).
Google may be much cooler and younger than old investment firms but it also prides itself on being the most hyper selective institution on the planet, thus hoping to attract talent with the promise of status (Should status hunger be equated with talent? — there’s an interesting subject for a future post). Of course Google will say they lure people in with the cool mission and the wonderful team … but they do lure people in with the promise of selection-related status, as proven by the book Work Rules! Insights From Inside Google, written by Laszlo Bock, the Senior VP of People Operations, who wrote at length about Google’s data-driven selection machine, in the hope of getting Google even more applications so as to have an even lower acceptance rate.
“In fact, we’ve grown by about five thousand people almost every year. To get there, we start with the 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 people who apply for jobs each year, which means we hire about 0.25 percent of the people we consider. As a point of comparison, Harvard University in 2012 extended offers to 6.1% of its applicants. It’s a very hard place to get into, but almost twenty-five times easier than getting hired by Google”. (Wow, if that doesn’t make you desperate to apply, what will!!!!)
Laszlo Bock’s book shows selectivity is a big part of Google’s hiring sales pitch as they count on candidates seeking status associated to strong selectivity.
Problems for these institutions are: the smaller the admissions rate, the more problems they end up having, because selection is a business with diminishing returns, for at least four reasons:
- If many applications have to be sorted out only to be rejected, there’s a chance the institution won’t devote enough resources to each of them. Hence it must suffer costly bottleneck effects, which ultimately destroy value as the process gets slower and more bureaucratic.
- With a higher selection rate, the process also gets more complex and involves many stakeholders: at each step, margins of error and conservative biases increase the risk of missing up on the greatest candidates and hiring only those who look like great candidates under specific constraints.
- Because they have to be always hiring and remain obsessed with the admissions rate, recruiters end up serving their own goal (being selective) instead of serving those of the institution (hiring as many great candidates as the business needs): because of this malthusian bias, the recruiting machine and the recruiting needs are no longer aligned.
- Finally, there’s a high probability that an institution that rejects people en masse will ultimately inspire bad feelings to an increasing number of high potential individuals: once these people gain success and influence elsewhere, the fact they once were rejected by the institution can create an image problem. How does it look like if you’re the one who refused to hire people like Sheryl Sandberg or Satya Nadella?
As a candidate, after you’ve eliminated the competition, you need a new club to aim for, which is why each selection has to be followed by another, because once you’re in, you have to go up, and of course, it gets increasingly selective… up to the point where you can’t be accepted anymore. A lot of pain comes from it but you eventually accept that you can’t get in, and anyway, you wouldn’t have valued it as much if you had been selected. Groucho Marx really put it best, “I refuse to join any club that would have me for a member”
Exclusivity is a marketing argument for every product that sells as a status symbol. Status symbols are indispensable to signal that you belong to the most exclusive clubs. Typically private chauffeurs would work as a fantastic status symbol. (Oops… that doesn’t quite work anymore…)
That form of status won’t disappear overnight — Google is evidence that it still drives the recruiting world, but it is definitely on the decline. Today’s status model is based on inclusivity: the bigger your network, the higher your status. The more influential you are, the more status you get from it. There is still an overlap between the 2 models — you may want to belong to the most exclusive club AND have 100,000 followers on Twitter — , but increasingly the second is taking over the first, for at least three reasons:
- Clubs can be as exclusive as they want, many more people don’t give a s… about them anymore, or worse, see them as boring and obsolete (sorry, investment banks, I mean you!)
- Exclusive organizations are not as solid as they once seemed. They are weak, and weak is not attractive. (Remember Lehman Brothers?). Even the big ships can sink, and we know that they do (sink).
- There are fewer ways of showing your selection-related status. With Uber and the like, a chauffeur isn’t a status symbol anymore. With sharing economy platforms, you have access to a lot of those symbols without actually being in the club.
Status today means being visible as an individual connecting other individuals. The company/organization you work for (if you still work for one) is merely a component of your network, not the source of everything. Organizations are now transient sources of status and, whatever we do, as Reid Hoffmann and Ben Casnocha put it so well in The Startup of You a few years ago:
“You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.”
Growing a network and becoming influential are not intrinsically easier that joining one exclusive club after the other, and yes, there are irritating narcissists who take the logic to an extreme, but it is somewhat healthier to seek status by connecting people rather than excluding them.
Laetitia Vitaud
with Switch Collective
Follow me on Twitter: @Vitolae
