I was a hiring manager at a company that didn’t recruit from top universities for strategic reasons. In short we were smaller and a startup so it would have been difficult to compete. As we grew we had a presence at university job fairs but still avoided the top schools.

Similarly we avoided engineers from the Bay Area due to cost concerns.

The company was also a pioneer in the distributed work environment. A decade before Covid. So that opened a huge market for recruitment at that time.