THE METHODS BEHIND THE MYSTIQUE


now?” Because, just like when you’re doing sourcing, some of the machinery to recruit people requires some ramp- up time. If you’re hiring somebody out of an undergraduate college, you make a job offer, and they don’t show up for a year, maybe a year and a half, so you need to think multiple years out.


career was short but included appearances on such television shows as “Baywatch.” He also spent time at a start-up and as a compensation consultant for Hewitt Associates Inc. Bock then went on to Yale University, where he earned his M.B.A., and from there, began a more conventional climb up the corporate HR ladder, including jobs as an engagement manager at McKinsey & Co. on both its high-tech and organization practices; and vice president of human resources, compensation and benefits at GE Commercial Equipment Financing LLC, followed by a move to the same position at GE Capital Solutions.


Since Bock has been in Google, he has become a widely admired HR executive; on his watch, Google consistently ranks among Fortune’s Top 100 Companies to Work For. Tat


is in part because of Google’s


many employee benefits, some of which are well-known: free


food, a beanbag-chair “three


environment and on-site massages. But it also has to do with Bock’s nontraditional thirds” model for human resource


management.


Bock has said that the intent of this approach was to transform the capabilities of HR. As he describes in his interview with Army AL&T, one-third of People Operations is made up of people with traditional HR backgrounds; one-third comes from analytical


backgrounds; and the other


third comes from consulting. Te idea is to bring innovation and adaptability to the HR function, along with solid analytics


66


to determine which practices work and which don’t.


Bock and the rest of the Google People Operations team are constantly looking for new ways to find, grow and keep Googlers and, while Bock is quick to admit that what works for Google won’t necessarily work for everyone, his methods are a study in workforce development.


Following is Army AL&T’s interview with Bock.


Q. You have helped guide the growth of Google’s workforce from 3,000 to more than 10 times that many people worldwide. How does Google plan for additional workforce growth (or con- traction)? How do you establish a vision for that?


A. I think there’s a military quote that there’s “no battle strategy that actually survives


the first encounter with the


enemy,” right? I think the way we do workforce planning is a little like that. [Editor’s note: “No battle plan ever sur- vives first contact with the enemy” is attributed to German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke who, as chief of staff, planned the campaign against Aus- tria in 1866, and the operations of the German armies in the war against France in 1870.]


We run an annual planning cycle, like a lot of organizations do. We do a lot of back-of-the-envelope,


“Oh, what does that suggest for two or three years from


We have also had some contractions and experience with the ups and downs; 2008 was a tough year for us, just like it was for everyone else, and we took a really hard look at what we were doing.


But the short answer is, we roughly run an annual cycle. We sort of


squint a


couple of years out to see what we think is going to happen, as a test of what is reasonable and realistic. You know, we may have 50 percent growth one year; are we going to do that each and every year? And then what we do is, we have a formal midyear check. But throughout the year, we’re constantly tweaking and adjusting our plans. So, literally not a week goes by when we don’t say, “Well, we’re going to add 50 heads here, we’re going to take away 20 here, or we’re going to add 100 in this other place.” And then that flows back through all our resource planning in terms of how you find people, how you cultivate them, how you bring them onboard, how you get them up to speed and how you make them fully productive.


Q. How many different areas are you talking about looking at, in terms of your needs—divisions, or whatever you would call them?


A. Te org chart is that we’ve got eight or nine major groups, maybe 10 groups across the company. Tere are a num- ber of different product areas, like, for example, knowledge, which is more com- monly known as Google search. We have


Army AL&T Magazine July–September 2013


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