As someone on the employer side of the table I see two frequent problems with university educated candidates that generally don't land the job
As someone who has sat on both sides of this table, let me point out that pathologies in hiring are very, very hard for a company to spot. After all, who is going to advocate the contrarian position? The ones not hired aren't there. Observers who are there often don't have anything immediate to gain and lots of political capital to potentially lose.
complete lack of practical knowledge or skills.
If those skills are valuable and hard to find, then it's an advantage to be able to impart those, for both a company and a country.
> If those skills are valuable and hard to find, then it's an advantage to be able to impart those, for both a company and a country.
Sure, but as a small company we can't afford to pay someone a "graduate level" salary when the best we can they need "unskilled level" training before becoming productive at all.
I'm not speaking of a Fortune 500 company or a AAA-level VC-funded startup. We have tight profit margins yet we try to take paid interns and students (which is a net loss for us because we actually train them rather than simply abusing them as cheap labour) because that's the right thing to do.
I'm also speaking from my experience of working closely with people running similar companies (let's say up to ~10 permanent employees) in Germany.
That said, in many cases someone with 3 years of actual job experience is more productive (in the short-to-mid term) than a recent graduate with 3 years of university (with no practice). Yet the graduate will often cost you more in Germany because of inflated salary expectations (partially caused by people reading about US startups and thinking the numbers transfer 1-to-1).
As someone who has sat on both sides of this table, let me point out that pathologies in hiring are very, very hard for a company to spot. After all, who is going to advocate the contrarian position? The ones not hired aren't there. Observers who are there often don't have anything immediate to gain and lots of political capital to potentially lose.
complete lack of practical knowledge or skills.
If those skills are valuable and hard to find, then it's an advantage to be able to impart those, for both a company and a country.