G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless

From In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal by Adam Bryant.

Talent spotting, in sports, in finance, in education, in virtually all fields, is notoriously difficult and unreliable. We are still substantially doing a try-it-and-see approach. That is fine if there is a reliable way to measure superior performance, good transparency, and accountability. Absent those three requirements, and you usually end up with a workforce increasingly inappropriate to the task at hand.

An interesting comment from the SVP of People Operations at Google.

Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?

A. 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. 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.

A very clear and forthright assertion.