There is a whole debate going on today about the relevance of academic grades in predicting performance and success in workplace. Google through its internal research have concluded that grades play little relevance in determining successful career. Lazlo Bock, Vice President of People Operations, very openly said “”GPA’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless.” in a New York Times interview in 2013. Depending on which company you ask, the answer to the question ‘Do Grades Matter?’ varies a lot.
Grades are quantitative data that actually tell more than you think
My own experience being part of recruiting panels for new-grad hires has made me concluded that above a certain threshold point average, grades matter very little. But when it comes to recruiting the right people, grades are quantitative data that actually tell more than you think. Grades acquired over the course of several years can provide indications about ones learning abilities, perseverance, and intellectual curiosity. In this post, I will share what I look at when I look at a candidates’ cumulative grades.
Grade Improvement as a Sign of Determination
I value strong learning abilities over intelligence and education. Most skills can be learned with time, attitude and work ethics is much harder to shape without a good starting point. Ability to learn from past mistakes and having the determination to succeed is key to success in today’s fast-changing business world. So, I really enjoy it when I see candidates with subpar or even just pure bad grades in their first years of study, but progressively perform better in their senior years.
When I see this, I tend to deep dive on how they overcome the challenges academically. The following general questions guide my inquiries:
What made them perform poorly at some courses?
What did they do to improve their grades in other classes?
What has worked and what has not worked in their learning process?
The right candidates are the ones that can critically and honestly assess what they did not do right and most importantly the key factors that allowed them to overcome their challenges.
Bad Grades – Let’s Talk About Weaknesses
It’s really hard to talk about strength and weaknesses out of vacuum. Bad grades are great starting point to talk about weakness or failure. Interviewing someone with straight A’s, the strengths are clear to see, but when it comes to weakness, I will have dig somewhere else.
I like it when I see a student with a good average GPA sprinkled with bad grades here and there. Good stories usually can be found on those grades. I will ask open-ended questions on why they think they did not do well in the courses. The following general questions usually guide my inquiry:
Why do you think you did not perform in those subjects?
What do you do when given a challenge that you are weak at?
How do you feel and what do you do when you receive a bad or failing grade?
Sprinkles of bad grades can shape a person’s understanding of his strengths and weaknesses. Before alluding to my next point about choice of courses, I truly appreciate it when a candidate talks about having to take challenging courses out of their normal curriculum out of curiosity.
Choice of Electives – Intellectual Curiosity & Risk Taking
When I was in college, unfortunately, I have met too many classmates who are in search of easy electives so that they can maintain or even boost their GPAs. I, too, in retrospect, have been misguided with my pursue of great average GPAs that I have foregone some great opportunities to learn new things that could have widen my horizon or even inspired me to create something new and different.
Electives are meant for students to explore and integrate different interests outside of their concentration. The late Steve Jobs of Apple talked about the calligraphy class he took during his undergraduate days that inspired the beautiful typography of Apple products today in his Commencement speech in Stanford at 2005.
Intellectual curiosity is a deep and persistent desire to know. Always asks and seeks answers to the “why” questions.
Now when I see academic transcripts, I differentiate grades from subjects of the chosen major and those of the electives. I expect, especially for technical positions, the candidate to have a minimum grade level ( ~ B / B+ ) in order to be considered for a job. However, electives are where I evaluate someone’s intellectual curiosity and ability to balance risk and opportunity for learning. Such curiosity is another key trait for success in a workplace, the drive necessary to solve complex problems.
The following general questions usually guide my inquiry:
Why and how did you choose the electives that you have taken?
Are there particular elective courses that you find useful for your future career?
What problems would you like to solve in your lifetime?
Why is it important for you to take these classes?
Finding Stories From the Transcripts
The most important objective of interviewing a candidate, for me, is to find out if the person is well-fitted with the organization’s values and culture. And to do that, you ask leading questions that allow them to tell stories about the times they have to face different situations and challenges. If the candidate has little work experience, sometimes there are not too many stories that can be extracted from it. Experience in student organization is a great way, but you really can’t tell if the person is telling the truth about his/her experience. People tend to talk positively about their roles in an interview and understandably so.
Everyone has stories to tell. Their stories tell a lot about their characters and potential
Academic transcripts gives me the starting data to come up with probing questions to assess their values. I summarized these general questions for others in my organization to assess if the candidate matches up with the values of the organization.
When I see straight As students, I will probe questions about failure and how the candidates view failure, or if he/she has ever faced failure. When I see failing grades, I want to know if the candidate knows why he/she failed, and what to do about it. When I see interesting electives, I want him/her to explain his/her interest in the subjects.
Academic transcripts are a great resource of data collected over years about a person’s character, ability to learn and capabilities. Make sure you use it to find stories that will help you understand whether the person in front of you will be a great addition to your team.
