I like to look at the puppy ads, they are still there. 
I’d expect the interviewers to emphasize what is listed on the resume. If the resume includes relevant experience in volunteer work or in extracurricular activities, then interviewers would be much more likely to ask related questions.
The full survey info is at http://chronicle.com/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf . It shows more detail about methodology and what types of companies favored specific criteria. For example, the media/communications employers seem to show a strong bias towards internships compared to employers in other fields. Science and technology employers ranked internships and employment during college far above everything else.
If you ask my older daughter about what’s important, she’ll say it is all about the outfit. 
For her first finance interview,I asked her the night before if she was ready (meaning if she read up on the latest market news, brushed up on her stats, researched the company, etc). Her response was, “Yup, I am all set. I got my outfit all picked out.” Ever since then it was running joke.
For a finance interview, the outfit IS important. Ironically, my kid was wrestling with what to wear to a career fair last week with lots of Silicon Valley startups. She had a dress she wanted to wear, but fell off her FreeLine skates last week and skinned up her legs. (Yes, she also broke her arm on them last summer…) Anyway, she thought she should wear stockings to cover the scrapes, but didn’t want to come across as too stuffy for those companies. She ended up wearing the stockings… And still got interviews.
If only we were worrying about what to wear to interviews! So far DS hasn’t put the magic words in his resume or something! He’s been very diligent from what I can tell, but frustrating for him.
It is never too soon to ask about the real world:). To answer your question, the hiring process is not really objective, in the end it is very subjective, it comes down to what the hiring manager and his/her team are looking for, what the position is. There are jobs, like investment banking at the firm that Dare Not Be Named , where if you don’t come out of a top rated Ivy or similar business program with a high GPA, forget about it, but those tend to be very specific industries. Accounting firms are still very stuffy and stuck in the past IME, and there you better have a higher GPA, especially if it is the big firms…
On the other hand, things have changed a lot. For example, Google was notorious for hiring only those with 4.0 GPA’s from ‘top schools’ (whatever the heck that is), and they had all these clever tests and such they felt would get them ‘the best employees’, the world turned on its axis recently when they admitted that hiring that way often didn’t get them great employees (tells you no one at Google bothered reading the literature, the notion of high gpa=great employee was blown out of the water many years ago, in fact there is a slight negative correlation between high gpa and performance,partly because getting a high GPA often involves gaming the system rather than being someone who can think on their feet and learn, partly because high GPA students often come out thinking they know a lot more than they do and don’t get along well with others). That doesn’t mean you should be a total foul up and have a 2.0, it just means that having a 3.8 or 3.9 versus a 3.5 is necessarily a killer, or even a 3.0…it depends on who is hiring and what they are looking for. I knew a manager at my prior job who believed, partly because of the culture he was from, that GPA and school meant everything, even interviewing people with experience, and on hiring new hires would hire only from ‘top schools, highly ranked’ with stellar GPA’s…and had one of the worst departments around, constant turnover, bad performance, because many of the people he hired quite frankly were ill equipped to handle the positions and job the area did (actually, neither did the manager, but that is another story). Someone finally figured out said manager didn’t know what he was doing, and was moved into something more suitable.
Going to Columbia will help you,especially on the first job, the name is out there, and their engineering school is respected (disclaimer, my brother got his BS and MS in engineering from there, and despite that, I still think it is a great program lol). Because it is respected, it can help you get internships in companies around the NYC area, and engineering graduates are well thought of outside engineering, one of the senior business people where I work has a chem engineering degree from MIT, but went to work for McKimsey out of college in an unrelated field, been in trading and financial industry the rest of the time…
What do I think the biggest factor is? Having work experience is huge, better if in the area you want to go into, but even lowly job experience can help. If i had a choice between a kid who had a 4.0 and little to no job experience, and a kid with a 3.0 that had worked, shown he could work places, do the job, and also showed he had lived a little (based on perhaps volunteer work, interests and so forth) I would take the 3.0. Get to know the professors in your department, and if they like you can help find internships and such. Don’t be afraid to go to career services and see if they have part time jobs posted, or jobs outside the normal recruiting process (I got my first job out of school like that, was in a pile of “miscellaneous” jobs that turned into a career for me:). Work experience is valuable, as is volunteer experience, it shows maturity and the ability to do things, work with people and so forth. Plus you will come in with tangible skills you can list on your resume, outside the stuff you learned in the classroom, and that is huge. What really tends to work is if you intern at the same company over multiple years and show you have done different things, that will catch their eye.
Shaping the resume is important, a lot of places uses buzzword bingo screening to look at resumes (ie HR departments are lazy), so having it done right is important, career services is usually good at helping with that, or as others say, take a look at Linked in and other sites, they have valuable articles and such on it.
Once in the interview, personality matters a lot, it is about fit. If it is a team of geeks where everyone sits hunched over a monitor coding, an introvert may do well, but if it is a job that has heavy interaction with other people, personality matters a lot, a good part of hiring decisions is on fit, and it isn’t just knowledge. In an interview you are selling yourself, and how well you do that matters.
My last piece of advice is when you go in for an interview, do your research, read about the company, what they do, see where they have been, where they seem to be going (there is always a ton of stuff about almost any company out there that is above a certain size, and even small companies tend to have presence on the net). If you can find out about the specific position and area of the company, even better, and frame it how you think you can help them…and by all means, ask intelligent questions about the company, show that you looked into it and actually are interested in working there. Big turn off for me, I ask people if they have any questions about the job, the company, the culture, you name it, and they say “no, I don’t really have any questions”, it is a big turn off.
Perhaps those strategies were to cull down the initial group to make it through the first cut? Most google employees I know went through multiple levels of scrutiny/review/interviews before making it to the “get an offer” stage
Quite frankly, I’m bad at people skills, but then again that’s why I wanted to go to New York.
@ jvm626-
That is correct, Google filtered using that criteria, then took them into the interview process before hiring people. The problem is that kind of criteria, based only on 4.0 gpas from ‘top’ schools, as a filter mechanism has as its base assumption that if someone has a 4.0gpa and came out of let’s say HYP, that they of course will be great in the workplace, and that simply isn’t true. In my master’s degree program, I took a number of courses that were a hybrid of HR and technical management classes, and there have been studies that show that people fitting that profile don’t necessarily do better than people with ‘lesser’ stats, that there actually was a negative correlation. I asked the woman who taught some of the organizational behavior courses, and she said that both studies and some psychological experiments with kids who fit that profile (not surprisingly, came out of places like Harvard, Princeton and so forth, since they had the kids right there to lure into the experiment), show that some of it is that kids who fit that profile often think that because they have achieved that level of success in school, that it is automatic they will be superstars on the job (and experiments showed, for example, that these kids often didn’t respond well to criticism, or learning from mistakes, in part the researchers felt because they had spent most of their life avoiding mistakes and so forth) or more importantly, that what makes for high grades in the classroom or the path to getting to a high level school is often about not taking chances, avoiding ‘risky’ classes, and so forth…and with kids with ‘lesser’ GPA’s or didn’t go to HYP, but maybe a ‘merely good’ state school, there is the “Avis” syndrome, where recognizing their stats aren’t as good, they may try harder.
It is why work experience is so important, there was a kid in my grad program who was an exception (who had gone right from undergrad to grad school in management) whom would have a really hard time in ‘the real world’, because it was obvious he had little or no exposure to the real working world, was all full of the theory and how things should be done, and he would have a lot of trouble trying to apply that in the real world. Having work experience, internships or otherwise, show you have worked in the real world, not academia, and can deal with the very different world when you are working.
Ironically, Google tried to use ‘science’ in hiring, but in doing so, were ignoring the very real information out there that the approach they were taking didn’t work and that they were throwing out a lot of babies with the bathwater.