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June 20, 2013
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“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 full interview is definitely worth your time, but here are some of the
highlights:
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.”
Please share your thoughts on these insights below, and as I’ll be writing
frequently on LinkedIn, please hit my FOLLOW button to see future posts.
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.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images |
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