How Important Is Getting Good Grades in School?

Those people who have never understood the link between success in school and success in real-life employment situations have something to smile about. For them, a 2013 interview with Google HR guru Laszlo Bock, in which he described how the tech company finds top candidates, was affirmation that one size doesn’t always fit all when it comes to Google's hiring process. Google doesn’t follow the typical hiring and recruiting path, which has always been based on the personal interview, grade-point average, and test scores. That data is not that important to Google. Instead, the tech giant is more interested in creative, out-of-the-box thinkers. “You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer,” Bock explained.

Relying on GPA is now DOA:

• “Academic environments are artificial environments,” said Bock, whose official title is "Senior Vice President of People Operations." “People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment.”
• Google used to pose impossibly difficult brain teasers during interviews. However, Bock said that they were a waste of time. “They don’t predict anything,” he said, except to “make the interviewer feel smart.”
• The only thing that works, Bock said, are behavioral interviews. Google now uses a consistent set of questions that ask people how they reacted in specific situations. The answers are thought to be good barometers of future performance.