You know the basics: wear business professional attire, take copies of your resume with you, and do your homework on the company you want to work for. Being nervous is good because it keeps you on your toes, but being too anxious will lead to excessive stammering and no job offer. It’s pretty simple right?

Well, turns out that there’s a lot more to the recruiting and interviewing process than most people are aware of – especially for those jobs in business and law which lead to glamorous lifestyles. Pedigree, How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Lauren A. Rivera reveals the truth behind this complex process.

Have you had people tell you that your undergraduate school doesn’t really matter? False. Big banks and top law firms are more likely to pick candidates who have Ivy Leagues on their resumes than those who are from “target schools.” And if you’re not even at a target school, good luck. You can attend career fairs, but the truth is that most of those recruiters were forced to go to that school. On the other hand, companies actually spend thousands of dollars trying to get students from Ivy Leagues to join their firms.

Many of these recruiters believe that by going to the top schools in the nation, they are getting the best of the best. (Because apparently being average at Harvard is still better than being in the top 10% at a state university.) There is the underlying assumption that students went to the best school that they got into – a very incorrect assumption. Financial aid is a major part of the college selection process, a factor which many interviewers seem to be oblivious to. An education at these top universities is not cheap; a job at a top firm is therefore far more likely for a student from an already wealthy background.

Very few students from “average” universities actually get jobs at these prestigious firms, and they usually get them through personal contacts, family members, or a stroke of good luck. Many recruiters have even admitted to not even looking at the resumes of non-Ivy League students. Submitting an online application could be a shot in the dark as well, because the people who review these applications and resumes have demanding jobs to get done and would prefer to spend time on “real” work.

To top it all off, men and women are evaluated differently during the interview. Here’s just a small preview of Rivera’s eye-opening book:

“Polish also had an important gendered component. Stereotypes of competence portray women as having better communication skills than men. Similarly, [Rivera’s] analysis of Holt’s written interview-scoring sheets (which evaluators completed for each candidate they interviewed) showed that women tended to be rated as being more polished than men. Some of these stereotypes were conscious. At a consulting women’s recruitment session that [Lauren A. Rivera] attended, a senior partner at a top-tier firm stressed that consulting is a “women’s business” that capitalized on the “feminine” skills of communication and empathy. However, research also shows that in the workplace, women are judged more often than men on how warm they seem in social situations. Women who do not display warmth cues, such as smiling and nodding, tend to be punished harshly—often by female evaluators—and given lower marks in job interviews.”