Work & Carers : HUMAN RESOURCES : More Employers Are Checking High School Records Before Hiring

Youngsters seeking work at more than 10,000 businesses, from McDonald’s to IBM, are finding that bad grades can be costly. Companies, worried that poor academic performance and lax attendance could be indicators of an employment risk, are requesting high school records.

Employers hope they’re sending a message to high school students and recent graduates that school performance and commitment to learning matter--even in today’s tight job market.

It’s a message that may have gotten lost over the years. Employers have not always cared to delve too deeply into entry-level applicants’ school records. As recently as 1995, a federal education study found, employers ranked grades and school performance well down on the list of qualifications.

“We let standards go down over the years. It’s time to get them back to where they used to be,” said John Wentling, the general manager of a McDonald’s restaurant in Dover, Del.

Wentling is participating in a campaign by the National Alliance of Businesses to encourage employers to review high school records in hiring.

“In our profession, we have to schedule according to hourly needs,” said Wentling, who has about 70 employees. “We need to pick someone reliable, dependable and professional.”

The 2-year-old Making Academics Count campaign grew out of discussions among business and education groups. Both want students who will continue their education and will be motivated to make themselves more attractive to potential employers. The alliance, which started with about 2,000 participants, reached its goal of 10,000 this month, the group said last week.

High school transcripts vary by district, even school, but most usually have students’ grades, attendance history, course work and teacher evaluations.

Sometimes parents and students can be reluctant to give permission for the records to be released, however, worrying that employers will use the information on gender, race, disability and the like to deny someone a job.

However, businesses facing shortages of skilled entry-level workers have been complaining that students are graduating from high school without the skills--particularly in technology--necessary for today’s workplace.

“There were days when I could get a manufacturing job with reading, writing and basic arithmetic,” said Robin Willner, IBM’s director of corporate social policy. “Those days are over.”

IBM, based in Armonk, N.Y., asks for high school transcripts at all of its manufacturing facilities in California, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Texas and Vermont. About 30% of the company’s 296,000 employees are in manufacturing and development.

About 36% of high school graduates do not go straight to college. Furthermore, many high school students not planning to go to college have felt that school performance and attendance would count for very little later in life, said IBM’s Willner.

However, production-line managers prefer workers who have taken more difficult math courses such as algebra and statistics because they stand a better chance of figuring out the increasingly complex quality-control measures at the plants, Willner said. Students who have taken a laboratory science such as chemistry tend to do better with hands-on work, she added.

“The smaller the business, the less room for error there is in hiring,” adds Joanna D. Wragg, co-chairwoman of the work force development committee of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, about the trend to check high school records.

“If you tell me you don’t have time to ask someone to bring in their school records, then you don’t have time to fire them and rehire and retrain someone else.”