What do you make of employers asking job applicants about their high school performance? Besides the fact that I barely remember SAT or other score re

job application is fixated on high school academic performance — Ask a Manager

submited by

Style Pass

2024-11-20 02:00:07

What do you make of employers asking job applicants about their high school performance? Besides the fact that I barely remember SAT or other score results from high school or college, is this even a real way to see how someone would perform at work? It feels infantalizing and not the best way to get a sense of someone is “smart” or whatever they’re looking for. Is this a red flag?

It’s one thing to ask for GPA when candidates are right out of school and don’t have much of a work history to point to. In that case, it’s a rough — and extremely imperfect — stand-in for “smarts and accomplishments” for candidates who don’t have a track record at work. But (a) it stops being relevant as soon as people have a bit of work experience under their belts and you can look at actual accomplishments instead, and (b) even for candidates who are right out of school with little work experience (which will not be all of them), this is still an excessive focus on academics, particularly for an admin role.

GPA and other test scores are a horribly inaccurate gauge for how someone will do in a job. Lots of people with high test scores end up doing mediocre work, and lots of people with middling test scores end up excelling professionally. Raw “intelligence” or “knowledge” doesn’t always correlate with achievement … plus, it’s pretty well established that tests that purport to measure intelligence often correlate with demographic and socioeconomic background more than anything else.