In the ongoing battle for talent, no company musters the
same resources quite like Google. Google recently shared its insights on
recruitment and hiring. One of the key insights: the importance of effectively evaluating candidates
for desired behavioral traits, such as solving problems where “there isn’t an
obvious answer.” Forget about asking the candidate to calculate how many golf
balls will fit into a 747 airplane. “The interesting thing about the behavioral
interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and
you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see
how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable ‘meta’
information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be
difficult.”
Full article appears below.
SOURCE: On GPAs and Brainteasers: New Insights From
Google On Recruiting and Hiring (Date: June 20 2013)
Author: Adam Bryant
We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many
golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A
complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to
make the interviewer feel smart.”
That was just one of the many fascinating revelations that Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president for people
operations, shared with me in an interview that was part of the New York Times’ special section on Big Data published
Thursday.
Bock’s insights are particularly valuable because Google focuses its
data-centric approach internally, not just on the outside world. It collects
and analyzes a tremendous amount of information from employees (people
generally participate anonymously or confidentially), and often tackles big
questions such as, “What are the qualities of an effective manager?” That was
question at the core of its Project Oxygen, which I wrote about for the Times in 2011.
I asked Bock in our recent conversation about other revelations
about leadership and management that had emerged from its research.
The ability to hire well is random. “Years ago,
we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring,” Bock said.
“We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the
interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately
performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random
mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed
people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading
expert.”
Forget brain-teasers. Focus on behavioral questions in interviews, rather
than hypotheticals. Bock said it’s better to use questions like, “Give me an example of
a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” He added: “The
interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody
to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of
information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world
situation, and the valuable ‘meta’ information you get about the candidate is a
sense of what they consider to be difficult.”
Consistency matters for leaders. “It’s important that people know
you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that
there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on
their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within
certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over
the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to
experience it as very restrictive.
GPAs don’t predict anything about who is going to be a successful
employee. “One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that
G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless
— no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a
slight correlation,” Bock said. “Google famously used to ask everyone for a
transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re
just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.
What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at
Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14
percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.”
That was a pretty remarkable insight, and I asked Bock to elaborate.
“After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is
completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the
skills you required in college are very different,” he said. “You’re also
fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things
differently. Another reason is that I think academic environments are
artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained,
they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations
when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was
looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more
interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want
people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Adam Bryant has
interviewed more than 200 leaders for his "Corner
Office" feature that runs every Friday and Sunday in
The New York Times. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected
Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed." His second
book,“Quick and Nimble: Creating a Corporate Culture of
Innovation," will be published in January.
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