Finding average employees is easy; finding exceptional employees, as every business owner knows, is exceptionally difficult.  One strategy is to target them young: heading straight to college campuses to pitch your business to bright, ambitious grads.  But where exactly should you focus? 

Rely on reputation and gut instinct and you’d probably name a familiar list of Ivy league and top-notch technical schools, but new numbers offer some suggestions that may surprise you (and offer campuses with less cutthroat competition from bigger companies). 

The analysis comes from London-based startup ViewsOnYou.  Built on top of Facebook, the recruiting tool gives students and professionals a personality inventory based on standard psychological measures, and also asks colleagues and friends to provide information on each other.  The tool them matches job seekers with companies whose existing employees match their personality profile. 

The company has amassed a trove of data on students, employees and companies on both sides of the pond, turning up some surprises in the process.  Among them: where to look for the most ambitious young folks.  What exactly does ViewsOnYou mean by ambition?  CEO Ab Banerjee explained the term as “a desire for success and career advancement” as distinct from drive or “a passion for something or obsessiveness to complete something.” 

So which schools have it in spades?  Sorry, Harvard you’re not top of the heap in this analysis.  Here’s the list ViewsOnYou provided to Inc.com:

University of California, Berkeley University of California, Los Angeles Harvard University University of Pennsylvania Stanford University Vanderbilt University London School of Economics University of Oxford University College London Boston University

According to ViewsOnYou’s numbers it’s time to look past the tie-dye and rethink Berkeley.  Apparently, hiding behind the counter-culture pedigree are some seriously hungry students.  Who knew? 

Which schools are you most surprised to see make (or not make) this list?