No Industry Experience? The Best Companies Want You

A jobseeker looking to change industries might aim for a no-name startup, in search of a management philosophy that favors unique perspectives over cookie-cutter résumés. That would be a mistake, researchers say. Prestigious companies are more than twice as likely to hire job applicants without experience in their industry than non-prestigious companies are, a paper (PDF) published late last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows.

To find out exactly how disadvantaged industry entrants were, compared to their experienced peers, Camelia Kuhnen, an associate professor of finance at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School, and Paul Oyer, economics professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, analyzed three classes of MBA students at a top U.S. business school. The classes were recruited from 2007 to 2009 and comprised 1,482 students, who applied for jobs at 383 companies. Kuhnen and Oyer found that at non-prestigious companies—those that placed low on a Fortune magazine ranking of top MBA employers—the candidates with experience in the company's industry were 3.57 times more likely than similar candidates without that industry experience to get a job offer. That boost was just 1.74 times for prestigious firms.