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Your #Career : Do #Employers Care About College Grades? … The Short Answer: Yes. Companies see GPAs as a Threshold to Manage their #Recruitment.

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Employers Want to see a GPA of 3.0 or Higher, & Many Put the Floor at 3.5.  Checked in with Dan Black, the Director of Recruiting for the Americas at professional services giant Ernst & Young, which Hires thousands of new U.S. grads every year. He says, Absolutely, he expects to see a GPA on a résumé. “Grades Certainly Do Matter when We’re Recruiting Students,” he says. “It’s really one of the only indications we have of a student’s technical ability or competence to do the job.”

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At the end of my son’s freshman year at UCLA, his grades are not what I would have hoped. I won’t print his average here but suffice to say it’s not a 4.0. He did get an A in a history course but his performance in two required science classes was sub-par. This summer he’s making good money teaching tennis at a local camp where he’s worked before, a job where academic performance doesn’t matter. But what about next summer or the summer after that, when he may try to land a paying internship at a consulting firm or ad agency? More important, what effect will his GPA have on his job prospects post-graduation?

I talked to career services directors at four schools—New York University, Brandeis, Rochester Institute of Technology and Purdue—and they all agree: Employers do care about grades. Students shouldn’t think that just because they’ve mounted the admissions hurdle, they can slack off in class. To be sure, many small employers won’t expect to see a GPA on a résumé, but most large companies will. According to a 2013 survey of more than 200 employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 67% of companies said they screened candidates by their GPA. NACE, A Bethlehem, PA non¬profit, links college placement offices with employers. Its members tend to be big companies with an average of 7,500 people on the payroll, including Kellogg, Procter & Gamble and Bank of America.

 

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I also checked in with Dan Black, the director of recruiting for the Americas at professional services giant Ernst & Young, which hires thousands of new U.S. grads every year. He says, absolutely, he expects to see a GPA on a résumé. “Grades certainly do matter when we’re recruiting students,” he says. “It’s really one of the only indications we have of a student’s technical ability or competence to do the job.”

The career services directors I spoke to all say that Employers Want to see a GPA of 3.0 or Higher, & Many Put the Floor at 3.5. But Black says there is no hard cut¬off. Even a student with a 2.1 could get a job at Ernst & Young if he had a good reason for his lagging marks, like being called up for military service in the middle of a semester. Or a student with a 3.2 could beat out an applicant with a 3.9 if the student with the lower grades were working 30 hours a week to put himself through school and at the same time serving as class treasurer. “I’m always looking for people who can juggle multiple responsibilities,” says Black. One thing Black says that startles me: he has gotten to know the schools where he recruits, like U. Penn., so well that he can evaluate what it means for a student to get a B in a class with an especially tough professor.

According to Trudy Steinfeld, head of career services at NYU, the companies that care the most about grades are investment banks, professional service firms like Ernst & Young and pharmaceutical companies. Even if a student is not applying in one of those areas, if he has a GPA over 3.0, she recommends he include the average on his résumé. Do include honors like cum laude and membership in Phi Beta Kappa, she adds.

Manny Contomanolis, head of career services at Rochester Institute of Technology, agrees. He also says it’s important to be honest because at least a third of the time, employers request a copy of a student’s transcript. Black of Ernst & Young agrees. “Nobody gets hired at EY from campus without an official transcript.”

At Purdue, career offices head Tim Luzader says many large manufacturing corporations like General Motors, Ford, John Deere and Caterpillar, recruit on campus and they all want to see grades.” They see GPA as a threshold to manage their recruitment,” he says.

What should you do if your grades are lousy? There are a few possibilities. At Purdue, students have the advantage of some 30 career fairs a year, where they can stand face to face with company recruiters and sell themselves. “They can tell their story, whether they were working while going to school or whether they had a disastrous freshman year but have done better lately,” says Luzader. Steinfeld agrees with Ernst & Young’s Dan Black that students can compensate for bad grades with a compelling story that they can put on their résumés, like describing an internship where they did an analysis of workflow issues and improved productivity by 20%. Another fix, suggested by RIT’s Contomanolis: If the GPA in your major is better than your overall grades, only list that, or list both numbers.

What about small employers or startups? Do they care about GPA? Not as much. But if your grades are good, go ahead and list your average on your transcript. Dean Iacovetti, director of recruiting at Apprenda, a software company outside Albany, NY, says he doesn’t expect to see GPAs on résumés, but if he does, and it’s a strong one, he takes notice. “If there’s an individual graduating with a 3.5 from Cornell,” he says, “that’s someone I’d like to see.”

 

Forbes.com | July 8, 2015 | Susan Adams