Over the years Google has attracted attention for its employment practices, particularly for its quirky interview questions which challenged many a genius.
It turns out those brainteasers have proved to be less than effective, as has the interminable interview process that saw job candidates endure dozens of meetings before being offered a role at the company.
A recent New York Times interview with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, discusses some of the company’s employment experiences along with some of the ways the organisation manages staff.
What’s notable is Bock’s findings on Google’s gruelling interview process with its brain teaser questions;
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.
The New York Times interview is particularly interesting as it reveals much of Google’s legendary employment criteria – particularly that of hiring only graduates with high university marks – turned out to be effectively useless.
Most telling though is what Bock found about managers and leadership;
We’ve actually made it harder to be a bad manager. If you go back to somebody and say, “Look, you’re an eighth-percentile people manager at Google. This is what people say.” They might say, “Well, you know, I’m actually better than that.” And then I’ll say, “That’s how you feel. But these are the facts that people are reporting about how they experience you.”
You don’t actually have to do that much more. Because for most people, just knowing that information causes them to change their conduct.
Who would have thought that accountability would make people behave better and more effectively?
Despite Google’s learning on hiring and management, things still go wrong. Business Insider’s Nicholas Carson has a wonderful story on the difficulties at restaurant review site Zagats which was taken over by the search engine giant and absorbed into their maps and geolocation divison.
The problems at Zagats though owe more to a cultural mismatch, as Carson writes;
It’s about the collision between the wealthy dream world of the technology industry and the scratch-and-claw meager existence of freelance writers.
In the Silicon Valley view of the world founders and coders deserve to be generously paid but artists, musicians and writers should be thankful for the exposure they get and the odd dime thrown their way.
Google’s struggles with Zagats also exposes another problem with the tech industry’s hiring practices – that of ‘permatemps’ who never get on the payroll and have few benefits and no security. For years
this was a problem at Microsoft and it remains a common practice today.
The story of Google’s evolution in hiring practices and HR policies is something all managers should read as it describes the risks of relying on gut feelings and the importance of workplace accountability.
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