I understand that both are important, but for you, what’s more worthwhile in the long run?
Someone who has the best grades, but lacks the experience?
Someone who has the experience, but may not have the best grades?
It’s obviously someone who has both, but honestly, I’d rather hire someone with experience even if their grades aren’t the best. They have a minimum GPA requirement for a reason, but for me, that doesn’t mean that’ll I’ll just settle for that.
I’m always aiming for a 3.0 GPA or over. I’m just saying that experience outweighs intelligence in certain situations, but overall, everyone must learn to live a responsible and independent life (getting up on your own, getting to work on time, taking care of yourself, etc.)
Experience, for sure. This is actually the way most employers hire. Most employers won’t ask or care about your GPA. The ones who do are in the minority and typically do that because 1) they are a very competitive employer/industry and most of their applicants will have internship and/or part-time job experience, and they need a way to winnow the competition; or 2) they hire primarily or exclusively recent college graduates and grades are the best indicator they have since most people don’t have experience in their field.
For hiring, college GPA is mostly an issue for one’s first job out of college. NACE surveys suggest that is it mostly used as a cutoff when determining who gets interviewed (of course, other things on the resume are looked at to determine who gets interviewed), and the most common cutoff is 3.0. Beyond that, it is unlikely to be significant in hiring, especially after some experience after college graduation.
What employers “should” do could be a different question.
It depends on the job. In my engineering career I have been asked about GPA during interviews for positions with several years of experience. Even the interviewers don’t ask you, you have to fill out the application that has question about GPA. One of the reasons they ask is to determine if you are sincere or not.