Grades vs. personality – what really counts

Are grades important? Yes and No

This is not an easy topic. To be quite honest, as a recruiter I have to say that there are two sides to this coin.
Personally, an applicant’s grades are not important to me and I don’t look at them exclusively. However, I know many departments where grades are important. In some cases, that alone is enough to decide who is invited to an interview.

Especially if they were not quite as good. You should therefore prepare yourself for this. If in doubt, admit honestly that you underestimated how difficult your studies were or that certain subjects simply didn’t come easily to you. Maybe you had to work while studying or lost focus for a short time due to private circumstances – there are so many reasons.

How to turn bad grades into positives

But you can also turn bad grades into a positive! One argument would be that you were overwhelmed with academic demands at the beginning of your studies, but you improved your grades in later semesters.

Maybe you just didn’t like a subject, but you persevered because you had a goal in mind and needed this course of study to achieve it.

In job interviews, you are often asked why you did a master’s degree or other further education. Was it really necessary for professional reasons or was it more a matter of personal interest?

Personality – what I look for in a job interview

However, I personally find personality more important than grades. In an interview, I pay particular attention to these points:

• How would my counterpart appear to customers?
• Is he or she friendly and helpful?
• Can the person understand exactly what the customer wants and deal with difficulties empathetically?

To put it bluntly: a person who has already reached a certain age, has his or her degrees to show for it and has gathered experience – at best, he or she is fully developed on the personality level. If, on the basis of his or her behavior in the interview, I have doubts that he or she will do well with our customers or fit in well with the team, then I assume that little will change in his or her character over the coming years.

Grades or personality? A clear winner

As a rule, we look for employees who want to stay with us for as long as possible. And that means that they have to fit in with us as a company and a team. If that doesn’t apply to a person, I’m no longer interested in their grades.
If someone is super likeable and just blows our minds in the interview, but the grades weren’t quite as good, then I would always choose that person. You can learn technical things. Especially if it’s something that interests you.