THE METHODS BEHIND THE MYSTIQUE THE MYTH ABOUT GOOGLE IS THAT IT’S THIS MANAGED CHAOS, WITH BEAN BAGS AND LAVA LAMPS
there are fewer people out there who are equally collaborative and able to lead.
Te third thing we look for is what we call “Googleyness,” or cultural fit with Google. And the biggest factors there are comfort with ambiguity; a certain sense of humility, at least intellectual humil- ity, because you have to be able to admit you’re wrong in order to learn; and we also often look for some evidence of just something interesting about the person, something fun that they will add to the DNA of our company.
And the last, and least important, thing we look for is role-related knowledge: Have you done this job before, do you know what you’re doing? And that’s the least important thing for us, because our belief is that if you hire great people, people who are able to learn and are humble enough to recognize when they need help, they will be able to figure out most problems. Tey’ll be just fine. But if you hire somebody who’s done the exact same thing for a really long time, the problem is that they’re an expert in that, but their pattern recognition will cause them to conclude that every prob- lem they encounter is the same as the one they’ve had in the past. Tey will rein- vent what they’ve seen before instead of doing something new. It’s like Abraham Maslow wrote, that if the only tool you ever own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail. We want peo- ple who have more than one tool.
Q. How can Google help the military through Training with Industry?
A. It’s interesting you mention that, because we participate in the Secretary of Defense Corporate Fellows program, and each year we’ll typically have a midcareer officer come and spend a year at Google, and we just find it such a great way to
68 Army AL&T Magazine
give back and such a good partnership, because what we get from it is, honestly, the folks from the military are incredibly well-trained, and the range of experi- ences they’ve had is just remarkable. And the rigor with which they approach the problem at hand and the discipline, the relentless focus on “we’re going to get it done, no matter what,” are really inspir- ing and instructive. And we hope to share back, you know, the kind of crazy way we do things.
Again, the skill with which the U.S. mili- tary does this is just unbelievable. I was talking to a professor at Wharton named Peter Cappelli. He asked what Google does, and I was talking about our prac- tices—how we set up the cafes, how we rotate people and some of
ments we’ve run in terms of what makes people effective, and in every single example, he would say, well, Bell Labs did that in the 1950s, or Xerox PARC did that in the 1950s, or the U.S. military did that in the 1950s. Tere’s a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge and expertise in these great institutions about how to do this stuff. And, for whatever reason, most companies don’t pay atten- tion to that, and it’s kind of a shame.
Q. How does Google measure the four traits you talked about? How do you identify the “best and the brightest” who embody those traits?
A. In the early years, we used to look at GPAs and test scores—SATs and things like that. What we discovered was that they were not very predictive, because those measure certain components of intellectual ability. But SATs are—I don’t want to say they’re discriminatory, but you see pretty disturbing patterns in the data based on the ethnicity and gender of the person taking the test, and their socioeconomic status.
July–September 2013 the experi-
So we moved away from that, and instead what we do now is, we use structured behavioral interviews. It’s a well-known technique, but we have a series of ques- tions that we ask that we have statistically validated, and we know that good per- formance on these questions correlates with good subsequent job performance. It’s basically the kind of question where the format is, “Tell me about a time when you had to solve a difficult problem.” Te interviewee will give you an answer, and then you ask them about why they did it and how they approached it; there’s a sequence of questions you go through. And it turns out to be much better as a tool for assessing people than just about any- thing else. And we use that similar kind of structure for all the attributes we look for.
Te other thing we do is, we will have usually four people interview each can- didate and do an assessment of them, but no single person gets to decide whom we hire. Each of them does a detailed write- up and assigns a score to that candidate, but none of them is the decision-maker. We always insist that there’s at least one cross-functional interviewer on the slate, so that we have somebody who doesn’t have a dog in the fight, who’s just an objective, outside observer assessing the person. We then have the actual deci- sion on how to proceed made by another group of people. We have a hiring com- mittee, again made up of new people, who look at the outcomes, and then they make a recommendation on whether to hire or not. And then it gets reviewed by me or one of the other senior leaders in the company and then eventually by Larry Page, our CEO.
Built into that are a couple of things. One is, we try to make the assessments objec- tive, rather than “Oh, I like this person” or “I don’t
like this person.” Another
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