<p>Company I worked for had a pretty hard and fast criteria of a minimum GPA of 3.0. You could kind of slide by if your engineering GPA was above that and your non-engineering GPA was a little under. It was a well known high tech aerospace company (in the group I managed, about 40% had their PhDs) and we pulled in a lot of resumes, even many years ago before the easy electronic submittials. With all those resumes, it was easy to be picky.</p>
<p>My son was the one about to graduate with no job offer that started this thead. His overall GPA was 2.8, around 2.9 in the STEM classes. However, his last two years GPA was about 3.4. He also had taken much more than the minimum required classes in his major, robotics, as he took 5 years to graduate (due primarily to class availability) and always taking a full class load. </p>
<p>He bypassed the larger companies that would have a GPA criteria and looked into smaller companies (which was also more his preference). Several companies had him take various “tests” within the in-plant interviews. The company that he ended up working for gave him a 2 hour design problem test with several small problems and 1 large design exercise. A lot of the discussion with his future boss was the results of that testing. I had never heard of this kind of testing being done during the interview process but it seems like a good idea to me. You can see right away how a person will perform. </p>
<p>So as far as I can see, the 3.0 GPA is kind of a hard rule for the larger companies but not necessarily for all companies.</p>