How Important is GPA for New Hires?

Academic student success does not always translate to success in the working world, so why are two thirds of employers still looking at grade point averages (GPA) to assess whether someone will be a good hire?

There’s an obvious answer: it’s an easy and lazy way out. Ranking a person’s employability based on their GPA is a way to quickly filter candidates, setting aside other important (but more difficult to discover) factors such as work experience and employee attitude. By relying on GPA scores alone, you risk never giving a candidate the chance to make an in-person impression.

So, while GPA can be important, it’s not the only merit on which your company should rely. Instead of taking the easy way out, there are several other factors that you should

The Argument Against GPA

The truth about GPA is that good grades and test scores aren’t a predictor of a good employee — they instead indicate that someone is skilled in mastering the few core competencies required by academia. Instead, consider looking for qualities such as a candidate’s willingness to learn, non-traditional leadership characteristics, and a sense of humility and ownership.

Here’s another challenge with GPA hiring: no two GPA are the same. Schools have different GPA averages — that means a student who got a high GPA at a school with a 3.7 average is different than a student who got the same GPA at a school with a 3.2 average. Despite the GPA figure being the same, the student at the second school would have worked a lot harder for that grade. As an employer, it’s understandable to not know the GPA averages and bell curves of each institution and school — but you should realize it could lead to skewered hiring pools. GPA hiring also fails to take into account how well a school is resourced, i.e. did a student have all the resources and support they needed to succeed?

When Should You Use GPA?

A candidate’s GPA score shouldn’t always be tossed aside.

Ben Casnocha makes a strong argument in his blog post about this topic. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor is on-the-fence about the importance of GPA, but notes grades are more important in some fields than others. For example, soft skills such as creativity, perseverance, and sociability — ones that are particularly important in marketing, sales, and executive roles — are competencies not effectively captured through tests and grade results. As a result, GPA consideration goes out the window more often for these positions. For fields such as engineering, however, where hard skills such as math, science, and physics are demanded, a GPA score and traditional academic skills may be a better indicator of performance. Casnocha also notes that a high GPA indicates the ability to follow directions and leadership, which is an asset in the workplace.

For the construction and manufacturing industries, reliance on GPA should sit somewhere in the middle. Seeing that a candidate performed well in STEM-related fields will demonstrate a certain level of expertise for these valuable hands-on skills. However, construction sites and manufacturing floors also require a strong positive attitude, sense of teamwork and cooperation, and other skills that can only be assessed through references, speaking to a candidate in person, and sometimes, through pre-hire assessments.

In the end, there is absolutely no way to know how a 4.0 GPA student will perform in your workplace. Paid internships and apprenticeships with students are excellent ways to gain a better assessment of interesting candidates, and can help you observe other skills or weaknesses that don’t show up on a report card or test score. Finally, ensuring you have an applicant tracking system for recruiters will mean you can find and hire the right candidates based on more than just GPA scores.