> Part of the reason I never bothered with them - IMHO a company who heavily bases their hiring choices on school grades is not someone I want to work for.
I worked for NVIDIA in a key group on key projects, and I never even finished my university degree (though my grades were very good). To make a general and hopefully obvious statement, if you're hiring someone fresh out of school with a bachelor's degree but no real-world accomplishments, you have to judge them by some objective measure, and grades are part of that. If you're dealing with someone with real-world accomplishments, it's a completely different matter.
When interviewing people during my time there, I personally never so much as glanced at their GPAs. But then again our group generally only hired people who had (and would soon have) Ph.D. degrees or experienced hackers whose past work spoke for itself. I imagine if you're hiring for entry-level positions, you need a very different approach just for the first round of culling due to the sheer volume of applicants.
I worked for NVIDIA in a key group on key projects, and I never even finished my university degree (though my grades were very good). To make a general and hopefully obvious statement, if you're hiring someone fresh out of school with a bachelor's degree but no real-world accomplishments, you have to judge them by some objective measure, and grades are part of that. If you're dealing with someone with real-world accomplishments, it's a completely different matter.
When interviewing people during my time there, I personally never so much as glanced at their GPAs. But then again our group generally only hired people who had (and would soon have) Ph.D. degrees or experienced hackers whose past work spoke for itself. I imagine if you're hiring for entry-level positions, you need a very different approach just for the first round of culling due to the sheer volume of applicants.