
Biased Hiring at Fintech
Why do companies like Fi, Jupiter, Airtel, Paytm, Wells Fargo, Razorpay, Phonepe and other players in Fintech space hire folks from IIT/NIT with chemical and mechanical background with no prior experience than a folk like me who is an immediate joiner, who has 4 years of experience in product management, have bachelors in computer science, a dual MBA degree, unemployed and looking for jobs for 1.8 years now?
They mention in the job description that they want candidates to have prior experience in banking or payments or insurance basically BFSI but they don't have any such criteria for people coming from IITs and NITs who join them as associate product manager with no prior experience at all.

This bias is there always, my manager who is from no name college prefers to hire from IIT/NIT too and we can’t do anything about it to be honest. They think he/she is from IIT/NIT than they must be good, less chance of bad hire etc.

Yes! Idk why. Like I've applied many times to Airtel. But my schoolmate who has BTech from BITS Goa with only 2 years of experience in 2 different companies was hired by Airtel last year. He worked there for like 6 months and then Paytm hired him as a Product Manager too. He didn't have any BFSI experience at all. Idk how and why he was hired and why I who already had 4 yoe at that time was not hired. I also reached out to a few PMs in Airtel and they said my profile doesn't match. I was like a guy who has less yoe than what's mentioned in JD, with not a good CV, his profile is a good match. I don't understand. And his package when he joined Paytm with 2.5 yoe was 35 lpa + ESOP.

Better pool of candidates to choose from. If you filter applicationa based on college tag, you will have a better hiring pool to finalize a candidate.
We all know this as a stereotype, average candidate IIT/NIT/BITS person>>average candidate from other colleges.