Making school matter - considering high-school grades in employee recruitment

HR Magazine, August, 1999 by Patricia A. Rouzer

When students demand to know what relevance their high school grades will have in the post-graduation world of work, HR professionals and educators in many areas of the country increasingly reply, "Plenty."

Their answer is grounded in a nationwide initiative by the 400-member Business Coalition for Educations Reform, including the National Alliance of Business (NAB), The Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "Making Academics Count" seeks to persuade employers to consider grades, attitude and school attendance when they hire entry-level workers fresh from high school graduation. NAB said this June that 5,000 firms across the country ask for school records when they hire - a number it hoped would swell to 10,000 employers this summer.

The idea behind the drive to make grades relevant in the workplace is both simple and logical. College-bound students have plenty of incentive to get good grades to improve their prospects for financial aid and admission to choice colleges. But non-college-bound students have less reason to study hard. Knowing that employers will look at grades, attendance and other school records gives school more relevance for school-to-work students.

Unfortunately, an employer's well-intentioned examination of school records is fraught with legal and practical issues for even the most dedicated proponent of the movement. While many business leaders and HR executives endorse the philosophy behind the Making Academics Count program, applying it in hiring processes can be tricky.

An A Is an A

A fundamental roadblock facing the concept is the issue of grade parity, says Janet L. Simon, SPHR, director of human resources for COP Construction Co. in Billings, Mont. "Grades are important, but only if you have a reliable context in which to evaluate them," explains Simon, who chairs the Society for Human Resource Management's School-to-Work Committee.

Does an A at Smithville High School in town mean the same as an A from Jonesville High School in the country? How do grades from private and parochial schools compare? And how does the HR specialist involved in the hiring process know? This basic issue is one that proponents of the Making Academics Count program are solving with varying degrees of success.

"Before we could begin to make this concept work, we had to bring in teachers and school staff from throughout the district to forge agreement on what A's, B's, C's and D's really mean," says Susan B. Vaughn, assistant superintendent of the Nelson County, Ky., schools, a system of 4,500 students between Lexington and Louisville.

"In our area, employers - particularly major employers like American Greetings and Toyota - don't recruit and hire directly, they use manpower suppliers, so we took advantage of this middleman approach," she explains. "We asked the manpower people to invite area employers to meetings where we could explain our grading system and how letter grades translate into specific skills."

The approach worked because of the staffing contractors' strong knowledge of and ties to local businesses, large and small. And after the meetings employers were more interested in using transcripts in hiring because educators had resolved the grade standardization problem before they pushed HR managers to consider school records as one factor in their hiring decisions. In major urban areas some critics question the ability of large, very diverse school systems to standardize their grading systems effectively.

What Records Don't Reveal

Employers also can get into trouble by reading too much into the school records. "Dependability - showing up for work when and where you're supposed to is very important to employers. And certainly school records can tell you if a student had perfect attendance or missed 30 days out of the school year," says Simon.

"What the records don't tell you is whether the student missed those 30 days because of a serious medical condition or just because he didn't feel like coming to school," she says. "There is great danger in weighing them too heavily, because they can't present a rounded picture of the person. And even if the student tells you he skipped school, that doesn't necessarily mean he will be undependable on the job. For that reason the best and most direct source of information about a job applicant is still the face-to-face interview."

Simon recalls a conversation with a student who skipped school regularly but was absolutely faithful about going to his part-time job and performing well. "When I asked why he didn't go to school, he said he didn't go because he didn't get paid at school and he learned more skills at work. He saw no correlation between school attendance and job success, so he didn't always bother to go to school.

"There is certainly great value in establishing a genuine relationship between school performance, hiring decisions and good quality on the job performance," says Simon. "The problem lies in making that connection in a reasonable, legally permissible way."