Golden Oldies: Do You Hire GPAs Or Talent?
by Miki Saxon
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Diversity hiring is focused on women and minorities (we’ll be talking more about this during the week), but there are other categories that are the focus of negative bias.
Obviously, one is age, school bias is still front and center, and, of course, GPAs. As an ex headhunter, i.e., recruiter, I can tell you that GPAs are a total joke when it comes to great candidates. It’s not that good grades are bad, it’s that GPAs don’t tell much of the story — or at least not the parts that really count. Sam’s story below is a good example of what you miss when you focus mainly on GPAs.
Read other Golden Oldies here.
I have a post today at Leadership Turn (a blog I wrote for b5 Media) that focuses on college student’s grade expectations for “trying really hard.” It’s worth clicking over to read because these are the same people you will be hiring over the next few years. Scary thought.
I said at the end that hiring managers might find it of more value to look at grades a bit differently.
Historically, managers and corporations have considered overall GPAs to be a significant factor when recruiting.
But based on current attitudes towards grade inflation, combined with federal, state and local governments’ focus on funding numbers as opposed to learning, perhaps there is a more useful use of grades.
Let me give you a real world example, I’ll call him Sam.
Sam has a 2.7 GPA, but if you look closer you see a different story.
Sam said that when he started college he not only didn’t bother studying he didn’t really know how. He said his grades in high school were mostly Bs and a few As, but that he never really put out much effort. His first semester was totally in the toilet and he almost flunked out when his GPA hit 1.8.
That was a wake-up call.
Sam buckled down. He started by learning how to study and how to learn and really applied himself.
Third semester his GPA was 2.5; junior year GPA was 3.1; senior year isn’t over. Additionally, the GPA for his major is a solid 3.5.
Sam isn’t getting a lot of interviews; he believes it’s because of that 2.7 GPA and he’s probably right.
But for a manager with an entry level position, Sam is solid gold.
Think about it,
- he knows that he doesn’t know it all;
- he enjoys learning and understands the value of hard work;
- he knows that showing up every day isn’t enough; and
- he realizes that he needs to perform at a high level to have value.
Sure sounds like a valuable employee to me—and one with a lot of potential loyalty to those who can see past the trappings to the real value.
Are you smart enough and confident enough of our interviewing skills to find the Sam hiding in that stack of resumes?
Image credit: flickr
