Do grades matter? Depends if you’re asking Google or Goldman Sachs
One of the best-known—and surprising—results of Google’s internal research into hiring and success is that academic track records don’t really matter. In a New York Times interview (paywall), HR chief Laszlo Bock said university grades are “worthless as a criteria [sic] for hiring.”
Other companies, however, have found something different. At the same conference, Goldman Sachs managing director and operations data lead Afsheen Afshar spoke “GPA isn’t the whole story, but it is part of it,”
So why is Google the outlier on the predictive value of GPA? It’s possible that Google just has more and better data than other companies on the relationship between academic grades and performance at work.
I remember reading that article, it was the most pretentious article I've ever read. Effectively the HR person they interviewed stated that, grades were meaningless, past experience was meaningless, whether or not the interviewer liked them was meaningless, school brand name was also meaningless, effectively making every possible criteria for evaluating a potential candidate obsolete, their innovative solution to determine success - nonexistent.
That's a LONG way from "every possible criteria for evaluating a potential candidate".
It's different for a lot of technical jobs because an applicant's skills can be objectively evaluated using work samples or more technical interviews. I recall being told about one entertainment company where the "interview" consisted mostly of making the guy animate a character switching seats in a vehicle, and he was hired because he was able to do it with a speed that impressed even the experienced members of the team.
In jobs like that, whether the guy is an asshole or comes from a "prestigious" school doesn't really mean jack shit for your team's effectiveness. What matters is if the guy can crank out code without the rest of the team having to stay up all night every night to fix his mistakes.
They concluded that past experience (work experience or life experience) had no bearing on a candidate's performance or success at Google.
I don't buy it. If anything, I would actually place significant more emphasis on GPA then test scores if I had to boil it down to those two, overly narrow measurements, at least for the analyst associate level. Obviously the game changes a bit if you are looking for someone to fill a position for a VP role on up, but then grades and test scores are generally equally irrelevant.
I feel that GPA is a better metric to measure someone's work ethic, and at the end of the day the analyst position in finance isn't rocket science, and I would much rather higher a workhorse than a genius who cant put in the time.
Also, it is very important to recognize that Google =/= Goldman Sachs, and the work they do is drastically different. This whole argument on the value of grades in this thread is based off some false premise that what works for google must work for GS or vise versa. Maybe GPA is an irrelevant metric for the majority of google positions, which are definitely not finance related. I don't know, honestly I don't really care. Ibanks have different goals and different criterion they use to hire people.
If I am an plumber hiring people I probably wouldn't give two shits about your GPA from Cornell as long as you knew how to plumb. Maybe the opposite is true for GS and banking in general. I just think the entire approach to the question and the context it is in is completely flawed.
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