If you removed bias by having resumes scrubbed of all University + past employer names, would you hire better employees?

Shouldn't university be experience?

Speaking from personal experience, I hired my first engineer who was just a student at a local community college. But, he has all the makings of a great engineer because he's the type of person who if he doesn't know something will spend hours or days if he has to, until he learns it, then he becomes a master at it.

That quality, which has become popularized today as grit, by Angela Duckworth and others, is I think what separates the good engineers from the great ones. The good ones will get to a point where they are in a comfort zone then not try to expand their skills beyond that.

The great ones will grind it out until they learn the more difficult aspects of their job; it's not enough for them to be okay or decent at something, they work at it until they're great at it. Anyways, if I had judged him based on his resume, just being a community college student, I would not have hired him.

But, because I got to know him I could see how talented he was and I think he's good enough to compete with any CS grad from Stanford or Harvard, or anywhere else. People put way too much emphasis on Ivy League schools or being a former Google, Facebook, etc. employee.

I only care about what you can do; not what you've done in the past.

Most research suggests that really small things on resumes--like your name, or your school--make huge impacts. One study of 1000+ applications found that all other things being equal, including degree, "Trevor" was twice as likely as "Tyrone" to get called or emailed back.

In practice most initial sorts on resumes are really fast--my guess would be less than a minute per resume. I doubt anyone is avoiding unconscious biases that way. The last hiring we went through, me and another manager threw out 2/3 resumes right away, and then only made it halfway through the ones that made the initial cut.

Anecdotally, since moving into the startup world, I've worked in <em>very</em> homogeneous environments--easily 80% white male, everyone heterosexual, no military backgrounds, etc. FFS a lot of these people even listen to the exact same music, have the similar hobbies, etc. I worked in a corporate environment for several years before this and find it pretty surprising.

There's also the cronyism thing, and it's pretty bad, but it's not much worse than anywhere else--it's just that the same people who at a big company would hire 2 or 4 friends also hire 2 or 4 friends at a company with less than 30 people.

Again, I don't think it's intentional, but in many ways the startup world is very much in a fishbowl despite its pretensions to hyperconnected social mobile whatever.

lol Stanford would throw a fit

I think personality is 70% of the equation in new candidates. So yes, absolutely. For the time being I'm handling hiring myself, but I'm not yet sure how I will make sure my standards are respected when the company grows. What I'm certain of is that I will be having no HR department, i don't believe they add any value, but rather the opposite.