AND THAT KIND OF STUFF GOING ON. THE REALITY IS, WE RUN AN INCREDIBLY TIGHT OPERATION.
thing is that we try to make it objective by taking people who would be biased out of the process. So the hiring manager gets one vote, but it’s not the deciding vote. Te people doing the interviewing don’t actually make the decision, and so on throughout the process. Te idea is just to make it as objective as possible.
Q. Are you saying that you have a say in every hiring decision that Google makes?
A. To be fair, I have a say in half of them. We route all the candidates down two paths. One is for technical candidates, like product managers, and the other is for everyone else: sales, finance, people operations, communications. I deal with the latter half, and I, together with one of my peers, review all of those candidates before they go to Larry. And there’s a set of senior engineering leaders who review all the technical candidates before those go to Larry as well.
Q. Is it just a matter of your going through resumes of people who are look- ing to work with Google? How much going out and looking for people do you have to do?
A. We do a lot of going out and recruit- ing. Referrals are our best
source of
candidates, in terms of what percentage of referrals turn into actual employees. What you find is, the very best people are in great jobs and they’re doing good work, and they’re happy. Te company’s recognized them, and they’re very com- fortable. So they don’t apply to you. As a result, you have to reach out and find them, and cultivate them, and over time recruit them.
Q. Do you have an infrastructure around the world that allows you to do that?
A. Yes. We operate in over 70 countries.
In countries where we don’t have recruit- ers, we have
recruiters in nearby
countries. For example, we have recruit- ers in London and Dublin and Paris. Te recruiter in Paris covers most of Africa. Te time zones aren’t too different; the language skills are more important, and in countries where we don’t have recruit- ers on the ground, they partner with our Googlers there to gain familiarity with the local market.
Q. You mentioned that referrals are your most productive source of good job can- didates. Can you give me the percentage that you mentioned, in terms of that success that you get from referrals, or is that proprietary?
A. I can’t give you the specific number, but what I can say is that if you think about the pass-through rate—if we look at 100 applications and hire one person, that’s a 1 percent pass-through rate—the rate for referrals is 10 times better than any of our other pass-through rates. And the other channels are unsolicited applications, like through websites; and retained searches, like if we hire an executive search firm to find someone for us; and people we find ourselves. We have a 10 times better yield from referrals than from anything else. Te problem is, we have 40,000- ish employees, and if we’re going to hire 5,000 to 6,000 people a year, which we’ve done in prior years, there are not enough employees to generate enough referral candidates to completely meet all our hir- ing needs. So we can’t rely solely on that.
Q. What other mechanisms do you use to go out and find these folks? How long does it typically take to cultivate some- body like that?
A. It varies. Te beauty of the Internet is that people are on LinkedIn. People are on Facebook and Google+. People are out
there, one. And two, if you think about everybody who gets a computer science degree, they’ve done a thesis, they’ve built a website around it, so all of this informa- tion is pretty easy to find.
But we also go to conferences, and people will visit our table. We’ll go to different industry events, and people will get to know us, and we meet people through that as well. And then sometimes, it’s like a sales job in reverse: You talk to some- body and they’re not the right person, and then you ask them, “Do you know somebody else who might be a good candidate,” and they say, “Yeah. I’m not interested, but call my friend Sally. Sally would be great for you.”
Q. How and why did Google arrive at
its management?
A. When I decided to move into People Operations in HR, one of the things I realized was that the people who end up in HR jobs are pretty homogeneous. Tey tend to have a very similar skill set, and it’s not an analytical or quantitative skill set. Tey tend to be “people” people, or they tend to be “process” people. Tey don’t tend to be deep-structured problem solvers in the way that a consultant would be or that a Ph.D. psychologist would be.
When I joined Google, I said we should fix that, and to be honest, I just made up the ratios. I said we should have one-third from each of
these segments: one-third
traditional HR; one-third strategy con- sultants; one-third analysts, very top-tier, incredibly smart people who can under- stand business. What we’ve found is that it’s an amazing combination, because once you hire the people, you start rotating them around different jobs, and they all learn from one another. It’s worked really, really well, and every six to 12 months we
ASC.ARMY.MIL 69 three-thirds approach to talent
CRITICAL THINKING
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