Was reading this news in Times of India...A top guy from Google on how they hire, what are the qualities they seek in their prospective employees... and was surprised to know what they said... "GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don't predict anything"
Am giving some of the excerpts of this interview here. Read the whole of it on the ToI website!
This interview opened my mind on several fronts... it brought a change in me, gave me several new points to think about and incorporate in my life. Gem it is!
-Gaurav.
Excerpts:
1. "GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don't predict anything."
2. "proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time" — now as high as 14% on some teams. At a time when many people are asking, "How's my kid gonna get a job?" I thought it would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer.
3. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not IQ. It's learning ability.
(Click 'Read more' below to continue reading)
4. The second, he added, "is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you're a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what's critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power."
5. What else? Humility and ownership. "It's feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in," he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. "Your end goal," explained Bock, "is what can we do together to problem-solve. I've contributed my piece, and then I step back."
6. "Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from that failure,"
7. "They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it's because I'm a genius. If something bad happens, it's because someone's an idiot or I didn't get the resources or the market moved. ... What we've seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They'll argue like hell. They'll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, 'here's a new fact,' and they'll go, 'Oh, well, that changes things; you're right.'" You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.
8. The least important attribute they look for is "expertise." "If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an HR person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who's been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: 'I've seen this 100 times before; here's what you do.'" Most of the time the non-expert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, "because most of the time it's not that hard." Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they'll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.
9. "when you look at people who don't go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people."
More: How We Hire: Google Careers
Am giving some of the excerpts of this interview here. Read the whole of it on the ToI website!
This interview opened my mind on several fronts... it brought a change in me, gave me several new points to think about and incorporate in my life. Gem it is!
-Gaurav.
Excerpts:
1. "GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don't predict anything."
2. "proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time" — now as high as 14% on some teams. At a time when many people are asking, "How's my kid gonna get a job?" I thought it would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer.
3. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not IQ. It's learning ability.
(Click 'Read more' below to continue reading)
4. The second, he added, "is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you're a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what's critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power."
5. What else? Humility and ownership. "It's feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in," he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. "Your end goal," explained Bock, "is what can we do together to problem-solve. I've contributed my piece, and then I step back."
6. "Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from that failure,"
7. "They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it's because I'm a genius. If something bad happens, it's because someone's an idiot or I didn't get the resources or the market moved. ... What we've seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They'll argue like hell. They'll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, 'here's a new fact,' and they'll go, 'Oh, well, that changes things; you're right.'" You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.
8. The least important attribute they look for is "expertise." "If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an HR person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who's been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: 'I've seen this 100 times before; here's what you do.'" Most of the time the non-expert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, "because most of the time it's not that hard." Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they'll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.
9. "when you look at people who don't go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people."
More: How We Hire: Google Careers
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