On GPAs and Brainteasers:
New Insights From
Google On Recruiting and Hiring
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,”
“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.”
Adam Bryant http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130620142512-35894743-on-gpas-and-brain-teasers-new-insights-from-google-on-recruiting-and-hiring?ref=email
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