How to hire an idiot

Everybody who has an education puts it on their resume even if it's 30 or 40 years old and they jam it at the bottom in a small font.

For example:

A weird school name - "International University of America", "University of New York City" often points to a diploma mill or a lack of degree

Missing GPA - The rule of thumb is, put it on if it's a 3.5 or higher. Don't put it on if it's lower and let the employer guess or ask during the interview. Or...if it's missing assume it's below a 3.5. It's up to you how much weight that has in the interview. You may be targeting a school or degree major that make it very hard to get a high GPA. If the school does some artsy fartsy "non-traditional" grading system and doesn't use GPAs, or they are from a foreign country with a different system, figure out what they do use and ask that during an interview. If the school is an "every one is a winner just for trying" school, they probably aren't the candidate you are looking for anyway.

"Attended xyz" or "Coursework in major abc" - means they didn't finish school. Somebody currently going will likely have a "estimated completion Spring of 20xx" or some such instead.

"Environment" - I see this often from candidates from India, and I don't know why this happens, but they'll list a perfectly good school and education credentials, then list environment and virtually every piece of hardware and software that they happened to have had in the room with them during their studies regardless of their use of it or not. Ignore this since it's obviously coming from some weird resume writing coaching and probably a result of trying to cram a CV into a resume format.

No colleges listed only a high school - no problem, if the candidate looks good, they might still be a fantastic hire. Especially if they are young and haven't decided what to do yet. You can always go back to school. You usually see this on resumes of young candidates or experienced candidates with no upper education.

There is no excuse to not have an education section on a resume. Experienced people will tend to put it at the bottom and let their work history speak for them, and inexperienced candidates will do the opposite. Resumes without that section should go straight in the shredder, same as resumes with typos, grammar errors, punctuation problems, a constantly changing font (or Comic Sans). It's like not putting your callback #, email address, home address or work history.

Also, if you are about to hire somebody based heavily on their education pedigree, you should absolutely use this service http://www.nslc.org/. The number of fake degrees on resumes is astonishing sometimes.

The only people who ever put their GPA on their resume are people with one or fewer jobs after college. Unless the best conversation you're prepared to have with a prospective employer is about your years in school, leave your GPA off your resume.

Any employer who "shreds" resumes without "Education" sections is a fool, full stop.

I guess I'm unreasonable, but, if you're looking for data points: hi, I'm a candidate who will turn you down cold if you require school information from me.

For a long time, I thought this was a New York thing, but, no; I got an offer from a very excellent NY tech/finance company a few years before we started Matasano, and nobody there was dumb enough to want to see my report cards.

By which I mean to say, even an anodyne reference ("yes I worked with person, yes I would hire them for this role") is a major improvement over no reference at all.