We recently ended our internships at our company and made offers to a select few who we wanted to keep. I would like to share the experience of one of our interns who didn’t receive an offer. I hope other college graduates can benefit from some of the mistakes he made. I would like to start by saying that he will make a great employee, but the fit just wasn’t right for our department.

First, forget your grades. You need to have good grades to get a decent internship. After that, no one really cares about your GPA—everybody in my department was an “A” student. In fact, the intern we didn’t hire obtained a perfect math score on his SAT. Being book smart is one thing, but there are plenty of people out there who are academically smart. I like to believe that there’s always someone smarter out there; the way to set yourself apart is to know what else you bring to the table.

Well, I got a new boss a few weeks ago. The thing is, my old boss was absolutely fantastic. He really knew how to motivate people, get things done, and assign tasks. My old supervisor was a very democratic leader and a very affable person—he brought out the best in the team when it came to developing and executing strategies. Like a lot of good employees, he left the company when he received a better offer.

The new boss has a different style of leadership. The mood of the department is now much more serious and much less about developing team solutions. Like most new bosses, he is mostly concerned about what he can do to improve the department. He is very anxious to demonstrate his value by contributing ideas. The problem is that he should really be concentrating more on learning the company and his direct reports. He really hasn’t come up with anything we haven’t already done or tried and doesn’t seem interested in getting to know any of us beyond a superficial level. I’m still holding out hope though. It’s only been a few weeks and maybe things will start to improve.

A lot has happened in the past six months. The department I’m in, while fairly small, has completely turned over, with the exception of myself. In other words, some people were fired and others left on their own accord. Either way, I’m the last one left and I’ve only been there a couple of years.

When I first started with the company, we had a lot of very smart and fairly hard-working employees. They were also fairly close to me in age and it was fun working in a fast-paced environment with knowledgeable people. It was the strongest department I had ever worked in. However, in recent months we have replaced this group of over-achievers with a very lackluster set of individuals.

I was recently passed over for a promotion. It basically came down to two people internally, and neither one of us was really considered. The company thought it would be a better idea to look externally, and I’ve never seen anyone promoted in my department since I’ve been there. When someone leaves or is let go, they just hire someone else externally—they never really look inside the company.

This mentality is not the norm for several other departments. For example, two people were given very high promotions from a department of about six people. Both of these promotions happened in the last three months. My company is sending a very clear message—they don’t really value the work I do (or my peers).

I’m not talking about your job description when you were hired. Hopefully, you already understand what your primary roles and responsibilities are. I’m talking about the kind of behavior you should exemplify if you want to stay employed when the economy sucks. Of course, you should continue to deliver on projects and assignments—this is a no-brainer.

Now is probably not the time to ask for more money or seek out a promotion. I’m always amazed to see colleagues continually push for more money, year after year, even when the company is doing poorly. I used to have an employee who was by far the worst worker in the office. Every year he would ask me about the possibility of moving up during his performance evaluation despite the fact that I made it very clear that I viewed his work performance as subpar. He was relentless in his pursuit, and it only irritated me more and more. When restructuring occurred, I took the opportunity to reassign this person because of disillusionment and constant nagging. Don’t be this person. Be the employee your boss likes.