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By
Lindsey Pollak
Posted: October 14, 2009 at 6:29 pm | Comments 1 Subscribe to this author's RSS feed 
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Q: Everything is so much more competitive these days. Will I ever get a good job when I graduated with a 2.0 GPA?
A: Some elite employers have policies requiring a certain GPA (usually a 3.0 or higher), and there is generally no way around that rule. To get a job with one of the gazillions of other employers in the world, a low GPA is a completely surmountable challenge.
In some cases you can squeak through by demonstrating that you’ve achieved better grades in your particular major or in classes related to the job to which you’re applying. For this strategy, you can list your “major GPA” or “grades from relevant classes” on your resume, in a cover letter or verbally during a job interview.
Here’s the most important thing about GPA: it matters less and less as you advance in your career and have more experience under your belt (no one asks a 52-year-old executive what grade she got in Freshman Econ). Applying the transitive property of career advice, this means that if you want your GPA to matter less, you need to make your experience matter more.
Understand that employers use GPA to gauge a few things about you:
• Your intelligence
• Your discipline
• Your ambition
Good grades imply that you are smart, serious and motivated. Mediocre grades imply the opposite. So, if you’re just not a good student or you slacked off in school, you need to show that you possess the attributes of someone with a higher GPA.
How? You can do this through impressive internships and letters of recommendation confirming your intelligence and work ethic. You can do this through consistent participation in extra curricular activities or volunteer work to show that you have discipline. You can do this by taking additional classes to show that you are interested in developing yourself.
If you have a low GPA, you’ll also need to alter your job search accordingly. A resume with a low GPA will likely never make it out of the slush pile, so your better bet is to find jobs through networking rather than online resume submission. On several occasions I’ve been impressed by eager, ambitious, engaging young people who have later told me they have low GPAs. Once I liked and trusted them, the GPA mattered a lot less. In other cases, I’ve never even asked about a person’s GPA simply because he came so highly recommended from someone I know and trust.
p.s. Since you are not required to list your GPA on your resume (I suggest only listing a GPA of 3.0 or higher), some employers may never even ask about your grades. If you get lucky and GPA is never mentioned, you are under no obligation to reveal it.
How important has your GPA been to your job hunt? Share your experience in the Comment section below!
One Response to “How To Get A Job When You Have A Low GPA”
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This one strikes close to home! My GPA was, shall we say, less than stellar when I graduated. I was always one of those students with an attitude of, “I’m naturally brilliant so why should I have to do homework like all these other plebes!?”. Not exactly the best approach, but I managed to get by through school, more or less. Ironically, I was always a very hard worker and fiercely self-motivated — just not on the stuff the teachers and professors assigned. Of course, to be honest, I can’t really say I’ve changed much. Annnyway…
By my experience, the relevance of your GPA depends heavily on which industry you’re in, and where you choose to work/live.
I work in the computer industry, and I just moved to NYC a year ago after spending seven years in Seattle. On the West Coast, not once was I ever asked about my GPA or alma mater. What interviewers cared about was my project experience, my performance on brainteasers and on-the-spot code-writing questions, my ability to fit in socially with the rest of the developers, and my enthusiasm about the company and its products. I believe this is pretty much how things work on the West Coast in IT.
One of the biggest culture shocks I encountered when I moved to NYC is the fact that recruiters and managers actually talk about a candidate’s academic credentials. I’ve overheard conversations like, “This guy’s awesome – he’s got a Master’s in computer science from Columbia!” or “I’ve got the best leader for this project: he graduated summa cum laude from MIT!” I hear this and think to myself, “Okay, he’s smart. But can he code? Can he communicate? Can he work as part of a team?”
I’ve also spent a lot of time living and working in the Midwest. I’d say that, in general, Midwest companies tend to be looking for you to be a “company person”. That is, they figure you’re looking to find a place to work for the majority of your career. Grades are important, but only insofar as they want to know that you’re a studious, reliable individual who takes things seriously. Equally important to them are more subtle, longer-term “big picture” things, like your community involvement. Do you coach a Little League team? Do you help with bake sales for the local children’s theater? Believe it or not, these things matter.