New Rating Lauds Ambition of BU Grads
Puts University in top 10 schools
BU students are among the most ambitious at any school, says a start-up firm that matches workers with employers. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky
Should a company hire only those workers who’ve gone to Ivy League schools? Abraham Lincoln would have been unemployed. Fortunately, Honest Abe wasn’t only honest, he was turbo-charged with ambition—a trait those who’ve gone to BU have in Lincoln-esque proportions, according to a new ranking.
ViewsOnYou, a London company that assembles profiles of current and potential employees for both workers and businesses, puts the University at number 10 for our graduates’ get-ahead gusto, behind (in order) Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Penn, Stanford, Vanderbilt, the London School of Economics, Oxford, and University College of London.
ViewsOnYou compiles its profiles from both members’ self-reviews and those of their peers (the company suggests that members invite reviews from their acquaintances on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sources). The goal is to match workers and firms based on personality and corporate culture.
“ViewsOnYou is not a psychometric tool,” the company website explains. “It is a structured crowd-sourced profile of what people think of you, answering the key questions that hiring managers really want to know about both candidates and existing staff.”
Ambition is one of 23 personality traits gauged by the company. Others include creativity, curiosity, sociability, competitiveness, appetite for risk, and conscientiousness. By “ambition,” the company’s CEO told business journal Inc., the raters don’t mean “a passion for something or obsessiveness to complete something,” but rather “a desire for success and career advancement.”
In truth, there may be as much marketing opportunity as there is science to ViewsOnYou, described by Forbes as one rock in an avalanche of start-ups seeking to tap some of the $140 billion spent by US companies on recruiting. These start-ups—ViewsOnYou turns two in March—address “a huge need for tools to make this whole matching game easier,” the magazine wrote, although the many sites peddle different approaches.
Whatever the merits, BU graduating seniors now have the advantage of a headline in Inc. that reads: “Your Next New Hire Should Be From One of These 10 Universities.”
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