<p>I have had interviewers (I am talking years after school, with a long, succesful track record) ask me my GPA and test scores, and I literally stopped the interview right there and walked out, because if they are asking questions like that the company isn’t worth much IMO (and in those cases, which I admit were relatively few, from the grapevine I heard my gut feeling was right, the company had that kind of uptight attitude, and they generally were known for high turnover, group think and suck upism, and only did well cause they kind of had a monopoly). I have heard that is common in Asian companies, that they make a big deal out of GPA, test scores and where you went to school long after you have been out working. </p>
<p>Funny part is, if Google had bothered to read the literature on the subject, they would have seen what they have concluded was known a long time before now. When I was doing my master’s in management back in the 1990’s, I took several courses in technical management and around HR, and the guy teaching the course wrote about 7 or 8 books on the subject, and they pretty much said that what Google and others do has no correlation. </p>
<p>Better yet, there is statistical data to show that kids coming out with the 4.0’s actually do worse then those whose GPA’s are less spectacular in enough cases to have some weight behind it.</p>
<p>I think the issue of school boils down to the fact that the way school works, it is often very irrelevant to real world situations, because its whole focus is on getting a good grade from the professor/teacher…so students spend a lot of time figuring out what the teacher wants and gives it to them. School is also very oriented towards lone wolf accomplishments, which is not true of the real world, most of what we do is working with others. The brilliant student who spends all their time in the library studying, who makes spectacular grades but otherwise has done very little, is going to have issues (have seen this more then a few times in my career). And school is a lot less ambiguous then the real world, the assignments you do, the tests you take, are mostly spitting back what the teacher gave you or doing problems the teacher assigned you with finite answers…whereas the real world is rife with ambiguity.</p>
<p>I know when I look at an entry level hire, I look at grades and classes to a certain extent, but I also look at a lot of other factors. What kind of groups has he/she been involved in? What kind of leadership did they display? I also look favorably on kids work experience, it is very very important because even the lowliest of jobs show the person has worked for people, worked for supervisors and coworkers, and had to show up at X time on Y day and so forth. </p>
<p>This topic comes up all the time in the music parents forum, about how if you go to a conservatory you aren’t gaining ‘real’ skills for the job force, and that perception isn’t all that true (among other things, speaking as an employer/hiring manager, music majors are often looked on quite favorably). Why? Because when you do music you have to have discipline to practice, to find the time to do it and find where to do it, too; you work extensively with other people in large group/small group situations (ensemble playing), you learn responsibility (you don’t get a paper in on time, you get a bad grade; you don’t prepare your part for Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, you make you group look like bad amateurs), dealing with difficult people , and more importantly, dealing with ambiguity, auditions and seating auditions and the like are ambiguous, it takes figuring out how to chart a path that isn’t conventional, and so forth. </p>
<p>The real answer is even with the best hiring practices, using state of the art theory, it often fails, could be great person in wrong role, person doesn’t fit the culture, person doesn’t get along with others, all kinds of things. Trying to use ‘science’ to predict future accomplishments like gpa, what school they went to, etc, [probably works worse then going by the opinion of the various people interviewing them and coming up with consensus. </p>
<p>The worse thing in the world? Don’t ever, ever let HR make any kind of hiring decisions, don’t do what some companies do, where HR interviews them first and has an absolute veto, all I can say is, we got some real freak shows interviewing where we scratched our heads, and found out later some really good people got bounced by the HR geniuses for stupid reasons. We had one HR person like that, who came out of an ivy level school and decided she would only allow people from that type of school, she didn’t last long when people found out what was going on.</p>