When GPA Matters
GPA really doesn’t matter. That’s the long and the short of it. Neither does size, as a matter of fact.
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Would love to hear more thoughts from those who have been in a recruiting capacity. Personally, I subscribe to the belief that experience matters more than GPA. The only utility of having a high GPA is to get you to a networking call or past the resume screen. For later interview rounds, what matters is how you perform, which is usually a function of 1) how well you've prepared for behaviorals/technicals and 2) your inventory of prior work experience that you draw upon to answer the behaviorals.
It also depends on the firm and culture. At some places, people will look at a 3.98 and think you're a tryhard no-fun nerd. At others, you'll be respected. It's interesting you say this coming from IB, which usually is in the former camp (after all, you spend many hours with your coworkers, so you really need to make sure they're fun and normal people to be around). From what I've seen, it's usually some select group of elite buyside shops that tend to place more emphasis on undergraduate academic achievement.
I don't get why people perpetuate the bullshit myth that people with 4.0s are instantly seen as nerdy/tryhards. I've never come across anyone IRL who has agreed with this. I'll use the GPA strictly as a gauge of work ethic / academic prowess, not for their personality. Have I hopped on the phone with a 4.0 kid who turned out to be a doorknob? Yes. But I made that decision only after speaking to them. When I see 4.0s who are in frats or have big club commitments, they are usually the best of both worlds.
Being that you are an analyst, has not managed anyone yet, and is still in school mode, you will change your mind when you manage a 3.9 GPA subordinate and they are terrible. You will realize that skill and aptitude is way more important than school and GPA. In fact most these target schools offer an irrelevant and questionable education. When that 4.0 Harvard grad Poli Sci major can not master financial models and struggles with excel, you will change your mind. Training someone from scratch when you have other things to do is a pain in the ass. As someone who worked in BB and managed people, hiring is very nuanced. You really have to carefully look at the resume through skill set, interest (you do not want your underlings to leave you after 3 months), personality etc. The hiring process at the banks and the buyside firms is severely flawed. You guys have been brainwashed by this process. If google can hire a high school dropout that proved that they have the skills, so can investment banks. Where you went to school just shows that you were privileged, obedient, gunner/tryhard, and someone who did not have testing anxiety at the age of 16. Banks are hiring adults not teenagers.
GPA is a great predictor of how someone performs in school. But Investment Banking is not school. You don’t get a predictable syllabus of when your deals are. You don’t get weeks to study before having to perform. You can’t find answers to your questions about deliverables on quizlet. Sure, there are some similarities like responsibility, ability to follow through, but I argue that prior experience is a far better indicator of whether someone is going to be competent at the job. For a bunch of people who are supposedly experts at relative valuation, GPA is a shitty comp for ability to do the work.
If we’re going to gatekeep IB using totally uncorrelated metrics, I’d prefer to use their 40 time. At least they’ll be getting from point A to B quickly.
I think this is a case where Goodhart's law applies: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
Screening by GPA is biased toward a pool of risk-averse candidates with a good work ethic. Personally, I'd be fine with a candidate that came in with a sub 3.5 if they proved that they really pushed themselves to their limits, accepted some failures along the way, but squeezed every bit of utility they could out of their 4 years (or more).
This GPA screening method just gets more competitive over time, as those who make the cut will enforce stricter guidelines for future candidates. Let's be real, when we size up a candidate we're indirectly comparing ourselves to them. So the survivors who played the game and propped up their GPA will judge candidates similarly going forward.
you're fucked