Google Admits GPAs are Worthless as Success Predictor

If you’re a job seeking recent grad fretting over your GPA, you may be surprised to learn that one of today’s top high-tech employers regards the academic metric as unimportant in predicting your ultimate success.

In a recent interview conducted by Adam Bryant, Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior VP for people operations, revealed some unexpected insights into the company’s views on what constitutes a successful job candidate.

“One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation,” Bock told The New York Times. “Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything. What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.”

Brock notes that skills learned in academia are different that those required to succeed in the real world.

“After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different,” he said. “You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently. Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.”

Lisa Fernandez Cookmeyer, CEO of Trigon Associates, a full-service engineering, consulting and management services firm also feels GPAs are overrated.  “In my experience, a stellar GPA is not always indicative of a stellar intern or employee. Neither is it an indicator of whether the student will be a “good fit” with our organization,” says Cookmeyer, in an article from EngineerJobs.com. She regards a candidate’s GPA as “just one of a number of indicators that I use in recruiting.” Equally important, she adds, are a student’s knowledge, experience and character, including extra-curricular and volunteer activities, recommendations from professors, and verbal and writing skills (revealed via resume, cover letter, telephone or face-to-face meeting). She notes that she has hired many students and graduate engineers with lower GPAs but who possessed other skills, interests and drive.

While you should always aim for the highest GPA you can get, a mediocre one can be overcome by other skillsets that make you a problem-solving, well-rounded candidate.

Image courtesy of artur84 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net