Nano, my background has led me to a position where from the start I separate evaluation of candidates from where I look for them, I first learned of conditional probability 33 years ago, it's now pretty much hardwired into my thinking, just in time for me to go senile
The general recruitment process is a lot more fuzzy, it's absolutely true that the probability of you getting an interview is lower if you went to an obscure or weak school, but it's a lot better than "slim to none".
Once you're in an interview, it's much more single combat: they ask you questions, you answer them, little consideration is given to your school. A slight trend I've seen sometimes is that people from what sometimes gets called "elite schools" sometimes come across as too academic and not "useful", but in all these things you need to understand that the set of decision makers about your first job are drawn from about 20,000 different individuals. Their idea of "useful" and "elite school" is highly variable, it's entirely possible to get two senior managers to list 10 schools each and not have them intersect at all (OK, possible but low probability, but about the same odds as producing identical lists)
Ironically this doesn't really affect most of what you personally should do...
Everyone needs a resume that is clear and defect free.
You should spend some effort on brainteasers and polish your programming a bit.
You should research the firm and team you are targeting.
The first difference is complex and subtle enough that I rarely put it up as public advice because getting the words right is hard.
It is to do with the branding of your first employer...
For two roughly equal job offers it is worth taking the one at the better respected firm (not the same as famous)
There is subtlety in how far "apart" those jobs would be for that to be optimal and for someone without brand names in their education that gap is larger, but still bounded.
The second is also a slight change, this time to the buzzword density in your resume, yours needs to be a bit higher, though I'm conscious that since I haven't seen your CV, I'm basically saying "you need more of things I haven't defined compared to a resume I haven't seen"
There exist a few tricks, the inhouse recruiters at GS are vastly less smart than most others such as Morgans and can't understand your resume at all, relying far too much on keyword search. That means if you can legitmately reference a top school as a buzzword (such as my paper was published by
Harvard press (or Cambridge or whatever)), then your chances of getting an interview go up a useful amount. It would of course be entirely wrong for me to suggest that you google some list of the top 30 universities in the world and paste them into MS Word, then format this list as 1 point high white text on a white background, which shows up in buzzword searches but not in the visible copy. Don't do this.
Also be aware that inhouse recruiters have tragically bad software support and typically use your email as a primary key.
You don't need deep database skills to be a Quant, but please look up Primary Key a) because it's very useful, b) you can use it to apply multiple times to the same firm without ever saying anything untrue.
As it happens there are two inhouse recruiters (out of a couple of hundred) who know what a Primary Key is, neither work for GS, but at least the GS ones (male and female) are pleasing to look at.
One last point is that from where you sit it is impossible to work out whether the signal of not getting a particular job or interview is a reflection on you or the market. That's a noisy signal in a time when most people face that issue to some extent, the way to deal with this is not tricky, just time consuming, you do need to apply to more places.
