Ducks in a Row: Hiring with Adam Grant
by Miki Saxon
Do you hire based on grades and/or the college attended?
If so, give yourself an F — for being a hiring dinosaur and ignoring the data.
Way back in the 1980s, when I was a tech recruiter, one of the best/smartest engineering vps I ever worked with told me he didn’t care about GPAs or college attended. He said that the value of a technical degree lost approximately 20-25% of its value each year, because the tech world changed so fast.
He also said that grades were more the result of a good memory and the ability to regurgitate information on demand than actual knowledge.
Fast forward to Adam Grant’s most recent column. Grant is one of the smartest people I read and I read a lot. Not because he has a PhD, but because he has more common sense than almost any other three (four? five?) combined.
The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. (…)
Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence.
Take a good look at that list. It encompasses all the skills that bosses, no matter their level, claim they want, but frequently pass on.
Why? Because candidates with those qualities don’t as easily “fit” into rigidly framed jobs.
Whereas one thing that can be said for straight A students is that they are expert at coloring inside the lines, so are usually easier to manage.
Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality.
“Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” Dr. Arnold explained. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”
Moreover, hiring with the assumption that you can reshape their embedded code when it is convenient for you is totally unfair and sets you both up for frustration, at the least, or outright failure.
This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A., J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.
So the when you go to fill your next opening give serious thought to what you are really looking for.
Image credit: Adam Grant
