OK Google - How Google works ?
How Google attracts the
world’s best talent ?
By ERIC SCHMIDT, JONATHAN
ROSENBERG, and ALAN EAGLE September 4, 2014
If you asked managers at
large companies “What is the single most important thing you do at work?” most
would reflexively answer “Go to meetings.” Now imagine asking the same question
of the top sports coaches or general managers. They go to meetings all day too,
yet they would probably say that the most important thing they do is draft,
recruit, or trade for the best players they can. Smart coaches know that no
amount of strategy can substitute for talent, and that is as true in business
as it is on the field. Scouting is like shaving: If you don’t do it every day,
it shows.
For a manager, the right
answer to the question “What is the single most important thing you do at
work?” is hiring.
The LAX test
Passion is crucial in a
potential hire, as is intelligence and a learning animal mindset. Another
crucial quality is character. We mean not only someone who treats others well
and can be trusted, but who is also well-rounded and engaged with the world.
Someone who is interesting. Judging character during the interview process used
to be fairly easy, since job interviews often included lunch or dinner at a
restaurant and perhaps a drink or two, Mad Men style. Such a venue allowed the
hiring executive to observe how the candidate comported himself “as a
civilian.” What happens when he lets his guard down? How does he treat the
waiter and bartender? Great people treat others well, regardless of standing or
sobriety.
As important as character,
though, is whether or not a candidate is interesting. Imagine being stuck at an
airport for six hours with a colleague; Eric always chooses LAX for maximum
discomfort (although Atlanta or London
We institutionalized the
LAX test by making “Googleyness” one of four standard sections— along with
general cognitive ability, role-related knowledge, and leadership experience—
on our interview feedback form. This includes ambition and drive, team
orientation, service orientation, listening & communication skills, bias to
action, effectiveness, interpersonal skills, creativity, and integrity.
(Larry and Sergey took the
LAX test one step further when they were looking for a CEO: They took
candidates away for a weekend. Eric played it a bit more conservatively: “Look
guys, I don’t need to go to Burning Man with you. How about dinner?”)
Insight that can’t
be taught
A person who passes the
LAX/Googleyness test has to be someone you could have an interesting
conversation with and respect. However, he or she is not necessarily someone
you have to like. Imagine that person with whom you are stuck at LAX has
nothing in common with you, and in fact represents the polar opposite of
wherever you stand on the political spectrum. Yet if this person is your equal
(or more) in intellect, creativity, and these factors we call Googleyness, the
two of you would still have a provocative conversation, and your company will
be better off having the both of you on the same team.
You often hear people say
they only want to work with (or elect as president) someone they would want to
have a beer with. Truth be told, some of our most effective colleagues are
people we most definitely would not want to have a beer with. (In a few rare
instances they are people we would rather pour a beer on.) You must work with
people you don’t like, because a workforce comprised of people who are all
“best office buddies” can be homogeneous, and homogeneity in an organization
breeds failure. A multiplicity of viewpoints— aka diversity— is your best
defense against myopia.
We could go off on a
politically correct tangent on how hiring a workforce that is diverse in terms
of race, sexual orientation, physical challenges, and anything else that makes
people different is the right thing to do (which it is). But from a strictly
corporate point of view, diversity in hiring is even more emphatically the
right thing to do.
People from different
backgrounds see the world differently. Women and men, whites and blacks, Jews
and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants, veterans and civilians, gays and
straights, Latinos and Europeans, Klingons and Romulans, Asians and Africans,
wheelchair-bound and able-bodied: These differences of perspective generate
insights that can’t be taught. When you bring them together in a work
environment, they integrate to create a broader perspective that is priceless.
Great talent often doesn’t
look and act like you. When you go into that interview, check your biases at
the door and focus on whether or not the person has the passion, intellect, and
character to succeed and excel.
Interviewing is the
most important skill
The interview is where you
truly learn about a person— it is far more important than the resume. The
resume tells you that the person got a 3.8 from an elite school while majoring
in computer science and running track; the interview tells you that the person
is a boring grind who hasn’t had an original idea in years.
The most important skill
any businessperson can develop is interviewing. You’ve probably never read that
in any management book, or heard it in an MBA course. CEOs, professors, and
venture capitalists always (correctly) preach the primacy of people when it
comes to success, but they often don’t say how to get those great people. They
talk in theory, but business is practice and in practice your job is to
determine a candidate’s merit in the context of an artificial, time-
constrained interview. That calls for a unique and difficult skill set, and the
simple truth is most people are not good at it.
Conducting a good
interview requires something different: preparation. This is true regardless of
whether you’re a senior executive or a fresh associate. Being a good interviewer
requires understanding the role, reading the resume, and — most important—
considering your questions.
You should first do your
own research on who the interviewee is and why they are important. Look at
their resume, do a Google search, find out what they worked on and do a search
on that too. You aren’t looking for the drunken Carnival photo, but rather
trying to form an opinion of them — is this someone who is interesting? Then,
in the interview use your researched knowledge of their projects to dig deeper.
You need to ask challenging questions that push the candidate.
What was the low point in
the project? Or why was it successful? You want to learn if the candidate was
the hammer or the egg, someone who caused a change or went along with it.
Your objective is to find
the limits of his capabilities, not have a polite conversation, but the
interview shouldn’t be an overly stressful experience. The best interviews feel
like intellectual discussions between friends (“What books are you reading
right now?”). Questions should be large and complex, with a range of answers
(to draw out the person’s thought process) that the interviewer can push back
on (to see how the candidate stakes out and defends a position). It’s a good
idea to reuse questions across candidates, so you can calibrate responses.
When asking about a
candidate’s background, you want to ask questions that, rather than offering
her a chance to regurgitate her experiences, allow her to express what insights
she gained from them.
Get her to show off her
thinking, not just her resume. “What surprised you about…?” is one good way to
approach this, as it is just different enough to surprise a candidate, so you
don’t get rehearsed responses, and forces her to think about her experiences
from a slightly different perspective. “How did you pay for college?” is
another good one, as is “If I were to look at the web history section of your
browser, what would I learn about you that isn’t on your resume?” Both of these
can lead to a far better understanding of the candidate. They are also quite
specific, which helps you gauge how well someone listens and parses questions.
And about that drunken
Carnival photo: Unless they demonstrate a serious character flaw, we generally
don’t hold a candidate’s online photos and commentary against her. We are
hiring for passion, remember, and passionate people will often have an
exuberant online presence. This demonstrates a love of the digital medium, an
important characteristic in today’s world.
Schedule interviews
for thirty minutes
Who decided that an
interview should last an hour? Oftentimes, you walk into an interview and know
within minutes that a person is wrong for the company and the job. Who says you
have to spend the rest of the hour making useless conversation? What a waste of
time. That’s why Google interviews are a half hour. Most interviews will result
in a no-hire decision, so you want to invest less time in them, and most good
interviewers can make that negative call in a half hour. If you like the candidate
and want to keep talking, you can always schedule another interview or choose
to make time in your calendar right then and there (easy to do if you have
scheduled the following fifteen minutes to write up your feedback). The shorter
interview time forces a conversation that’s more protein and less fat; there’s
no time for small talk or meaningless questions. It forces people, including
(especially!) you, into a substantive discussion.
Friends don’t let
friends hire (or promote) friends
Another part of the
interviewing process that most companies screw up is letting the hiring manager
make the hiring decision. The problem with this is that the hiring manager will
probably be the new employee’s manager for only a matter of months or a year or
two; organizations are highly fungible. Besides, in the most effective
organizations, who you work for matters a lot less than who you work with.
Hiring decisions are too important to be left in the hands of a manager who may
or may not have a stake in the employee’s success a year later.
That’s why at Google we
set up the process so that the hiring decision is made by committee. With
hiring committees, it doesn’t matter who you are: If you want to hire someone,
the decision needs approval from a hiring committee, whose decisions are based
on data, not relationships or opinion. The primary criterion for serving on a
hiring committee is that you will not be driven by anything other than what is
best for the company, period. Committees should have enough members to allow a
good range of viewpoints, but should be small enough to allow an efficient
process; four or five is a pretty good number. The best composition promotes a
wide variety of perspectives, so aim for diversity: in seniority, in skills and
strengths (since people will often favor people cut in their own mold), and in
background. The hiring manager is not entirely powerless in a committee-based
process; she (or her recruiter) can participate in committee meetings, and she
gets to decide whether or not to move a candidate from interview process to
offer process, meaning she has veto power but not hiring power. The hiring
committee ensures that people don’t hire their friends, unless those friends
happen to be superstars.
In the early 2000s, as
Google started adding employees by the thousands, Eric, Larry, and Sergey
observed that many of the newer hires were good but not as strong as needed.
Perhaps they couldn’t control what every group was doing, the trio decided, but
they could control whom they hired. Larry suggested a policy that senior
management would review every offer. The resulting hiring committee process,
which was developed by Urs Hölzle, entails a hierarchy of committees,
culminating with a committee of one: Larry, who for several years reviewed every
offer. This made it clear to everyone involved in hiring just how high a
priority it was to the company. The process was designed to optimize for
quality, not efficiency, and for control, not scale. Over the years, we have
done our best to make it scale efficiently anyway, but our original tenet still
stands, even as we pass fifty thousand employees: Nothing is more important
than the quality of hiring.
Excerpted from the book HOW GOOGLE WORKS by Eric Schmidt and
Jonathan Rosenberg with Alan Eagle, to be published in September 2014.
Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. Copyright © 2014 by
Google, Inc. All rights reserved.
I Hope you like
this, so don’t forget to Share and Comment on it–
If you want
any additional information on my blogs then you are free to ask about that in
comment section below -
You can find me on:
instagram/> https://www.instagram.com/k_aniket.22/
<Copyright Disclaimer
Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use”
for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship,
and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statue that might
otherwise in infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the
balance in favor of fair use.>
Comments
Post a Comment