Does it matter who interviews you: senior adcom or newbie???
Happy to be corrected by Sandy but thought I’d chime in.
From my experience in banking the borderline candidates get interviewed by the more experienced interviewers/senior people. I would imagine the same would happen with ad comm.
The why is easy: for a borderline candidate two things need to happen. One, you need to make sure that the senior ad comm members would sign off. Two, you need to make sure the interviewer is confident enough to say yes if they are indeed good.
Easiest way to get senior ad comm to sign off is to get them to do the interview. If the candidate is great the interviewer will have enough experience to see it and clout to get them through. This protects the school – making sure top class people get through.
There is also a risk with giving borderline candidates to less experienced ad comm members. Simple fact is that they need to go in to bat for people. If you are inexperienced you will be less confident in arguing your case against more seasoned members. This means that candidates who interview with less senior members inherently have a less powerful advocate at the table. Making borderline candidates go to senior members protects them too. Meanwhile “slam dunk” candidates are easy training for less experienced ad comm members – bar a major screw up in the interview you should be fine.
Exception (and I’ve seen this professionally) if Daddy is a very important person then the candidate is more likely to get a senior interviewer – just so the admit / ding rests on senior shoulders.
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INTERVIEWING W. SENIOR VS. NEWBIES. RESPONSE TO PRIOR POSTS.
hmmmmm, I think you are over-complicating the process and under-estimating logistics problems of interviewing 1800 kids for H and W: they dont pre-sort borderliners and then assign them to adcoms in training or senior people as you suggest, esp. not at HBS where applicant gets to pick date and time, and getting ANY adcom there is major logistical hassle. And what you do you say about HUB interviews or HBS Menlo Park interviews, where ALL candidates get filtered thru the same adcoms. I agree that in VERY RARE cases, e.g. Bush’s body guy a couple of years ago, who did not have a college degree http://hbsguru.com/media_econ.html –that guy was interviewed at HBS outside the normal channels, but man, that is 1-3 case a year stuff. IN most cases (99 percent), kids are linked up to adcoms sorta randomly, and the interview is just another piece of data (esp. impt at negative data, e.g. adcom says you would have hard time in case method), and interviewers do not “advocate” for kids, they often dont even know what outcomes are, til they get print out. I’m sure in some cases, Director might go back to interviewer for more info, but at that pt, it is pssble that interviewer has scant recollection of kid, quite frankly, beyond notes, which capture the big pieces. I interview A LOTTA LOTTA kids doing mock interviews ever year (100+) , and despite spending a very intense hour or so w. each, and going over files, 2 months later, exp. is way less distinct. The scheme you are proposing in your post makes some kinda abstract sense, but 1. the interviews are not that impt, 2. schools dont have the implementation ability to do it anyway, or dont think it is worth the hassle. Also, to some extent, newbie adcoms are trained R3 where they often sit on interviews, and also in 2+2 interviews, over summer. At Stan, sometimes R3 kids are interviewed twice (by dif adcoms, also happens rarely at H), which I think is some kinda holistic benchmarking on part of adcoms. Then they kinda say, “this is nuts, what are we bothering w. this for………….just interview the flippers and be done w. it.”
