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143 reviews for:
Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
Laszlo Bock
4.03 AVERAGE
143 reviews for:
Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
Laszlo Bock
4.03 AVERAGE
Sure, it’s content marketing for Google. But true to Googles standards it’s well done. This book is a solid look at how Google functions and the HR (People Ops) approach they try to take. Essentially Lazlos (Googles) approach boils down to ‘hire smart people and treat them well.’
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Lots of neat tips that I'd like to figure out how to implement in an exponentially smaller and poorer workplace.
Honestly felt like some parts dragged on. Good information but felt like it could have been delivered better
This is the best business book I have ever read. I wish it was required reading for every business student, manager, and executive. Maybe then the HR environment (and the data and ideas supporting it) would finally get the attention it deserves and the world would be a happier place.
An insightful read from a Google HR head's perspective ; the author has provided a crisp summary of the practices followed at Google for building teams, retaining employees, performance appraisals and compensation. And he has contrasted these practices with the industry practices. Many "best practices" are not followed at Google viz. Bell Curve (Normal distribution), 70:20:10 etc.
Welch and Conaty had implemented a 20-70-10 performance ranking system,
where GE employees were sorted into three groups: the top 20 percent, the
middle 70 percent, and the bottom 10 percent. The top workers were lionized
and rewarded with choice assignments, leadership training programs, and stock
options. The bottom 10 percent were fired. Under Immelt, the forced distribution
was softened and the crisp labels of “top 20 percent,” “middle 70 percent,” and
“bottom 10 percent” were replaced with euphemisms: “top talent,” “highly
valued,” and “needs improvement
Over time I learned that Wegmans and Google weren’t alone in their
approach. The Brandix Group is a Sri Lankan clothing manufacturer, with more
than forty plants in Sri Lanka and substantial operations in India and
Bangladesh. Ishan Dantanarayana, their chief people officer, told me that their
goal is “inspiring a large female workforce” by telling employees to “come as
you are and harness your full potential.” In addition to making their CEO and
board accessible to all employees, they provide pregnant women with
supplemental food and medicine; offer a diploma program that allows employees
to learn as they work and even trains them to be entrepreneurs and start their
own businesses; appoint worker councils in all plants to help every employee
influence the business; offer scholarships for children of employees; and more.
They also give back to the community, for example through their Water &
Women program, which builds wells in employees’ villages. “This elevates the
stature of our employees in the community, and they are then privy to clean
water, which is scarce.”
Google’s approach is to cleave the knot. We deliberately take power and
authority over employees away from managers. Here is a sample of the decisionsmanagers at Google cannot make unilaterally:
Whom to hire
Whom to fire
How someone’s performance is rated
How much of a salary increase, bonus, or stock grant to give someone
Who is selected to win an award for great management
Whom to promote
When code is of sufficient quality to be incorporated into our software code
base
The final design of a product and when to launch it
Each of these decisions is instead made either by a group of peers, a
committee, or a dedicated, independent team.
Dr. Kamal Birdi of the University of Sheffield and six other researchers
studied the productivity of 308 companies across twenty-two years and came to
a similar conclusion. These companies had all launched traditional operations
programs like “total quality management” and “just-in-time inventory control.”
Birdi found that these programs sometimes improved productivity in one
company or another, but “we found no overall performance effect” when the
companies were looked at in aggregate. In other words, there was no evidence
suggesting that any of these operations initiatives would reliably and consistently
improve performance.
So what did? Performance improved only when companies implemented
programs to empower employees (for example, by taking decision-making
authority away from managers and giving it to individuals or teams), provided
learning opportunities that were outside what people needed to do their jobs,
increased their reliance on teamwork (by giving teams more autonomy and
allowing them to self-organize), or a combination of these. These factors
“accounted for a 9% increase in value added per employee in our study
The Web in 1996 was a chaotic mess. In simplest terms, search engines
wanted to show the most relevant, useful Web pages, but ranked them mainly by
comparing the text on a Web page to the search query that was typed. That left a
loophole. The owner of a Web page could boost his rankings on search engines
with tricks like hiding popular search terms in invisible text on the page. If you
wanted people to come to your pet food site, you could write “pet food” in blue
text on a blue background a hundred times, and your search ranking would
improve. Another trick was to repeat words again and again in the source code
that generated your page but was invisible to a human reader.
Larry reasoned that an important signal was being overlooked: what users
thought of the Web page. The most useful Web pages would have lots of links
from other sites, because people would link only to the most useful pages. That
signal would prove to be far more powerful than the words written on the page
itself.
But creating a program that could identify every link on the Web and then
tabulate the strength of every relationship across all websites at the same time
was an inhumanly complex problem. Fortunately, Sergey found the problem
equally captivating. They created BackRub, a reference to the backlinks reaching
back from the site you saw to the site you had just been on. In August 1998,
Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems, famously
wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” before the company was even
incorporated. Less well known is that they moments later received a second
$100,000 check from Stanford professor David Cheriton, on whose porch they
had met Andy.24
A more recent, and less morally ambiguous, example is Mervin J. Kelly, who
joined Bell Labs in 1925 and served as president from 1951 to 1959.31 During
his tenure, Bell Labs invented lasers and solar cells, laid the first transatlantic
phone cable, developed crucial technologies that made possible the rise of the
microchip, and created the foundation for information theory through its work on
binary code systems. This built on Bell Labs’ earlier work, which included the
invention of the transistor in 1947.
A mission that matters
Google’s mission is the first cornerstone of our culture. Our mission is “to
organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful.”40 How does our mission compare to those of other companies? Here are
a few excerpts from other companies in 2013 (emphasis added):
IBM: “We strive to lead in the invention, development and manufacture
of the industry’s most advanced information technologies, including
computer systems, software, storage systems and microelectronics. We
translate these advanced technologies into value for our customers
through our professional solutions, services and consulting businesses
worldwide.”41
McDonald’s: “McDonald’s brand mission is to be our customers’ favorite
place and way to eat and drink. Our worldwide operations are aligned
around a global strategy called the Plan to Win, which center on an
exceptional customer experience—People, Products, Place, Price and
Promotion. We are committed to continuously improving our operations
and enhancing our customers’ experience.”42
Procter & Gamble: “We will provide branded products and services of
superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world’s
consumers, now and for generations to come. As a result, consumers will
reward us with leadership sales, profit and value creation, allowing our
people, our shareholders and the communities in which we live and work
to prosper.”43
These are all perfectly reasonable, responsible missions.
But two things are immediately obvious from reading these. First, I owe you
an apology for making you slog through corporate mission statements, perhaps
the worst form of literature known to man. Second, Google’s mission is
distinctive both in its simplicity and in what it doesn’t talk about. There’s no
mention of profit or market. No mention of customers, shareholders, or users. No
mention of why this is our mission or to what end we pursue these goals.
Instead, it’s taken to be self-evident that organizing information and making it
accessible and useful is a good thing
He found this effect persisted in other jobs as well. Lifeguards who read
stories about saving drowning swimmers were 21 percent more active in
watching over their swimmers. Students editing letters written by other students
spent 20 percent more time on them if they first met the authors.51
So what is Adam’s insight? Having workers meet the people they are helping
is the greatest motivator, even if they only meet for a few minutes. It imbues
one’s work with a significance that transcends careerism or money.
We all want our work to matter. Nothing is a more powerful motivator than
to know that you are making a difference in the world. Amy Wrzesniewski of
Yale University told me people see their work as just a job (“a necessity that’s
not a major positive in their lives”), a career (something to “win” or “advance”),
or a calling (“a source of enjoyment and fulfillment where you’re doing socially
useful work”).
Even the way the questions are chosen is rooted in transparency, using a tool
(awkwardly) called Hangouts On Air Q&A. Users can not only submit
questions, but also discuss and vote on them. This crowdsourcing prioritizes
questions that reflect the interests of an audience.
There are examples of companies that have pushed internal transparency
further than we have. Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund
with $145 billion in assets,56 takes one such approach: Every meeting is
recorded and made available to all employees. Bridgewater’s founder, Ray
Dalio, explains: “My most important principle is that getting at the truth… is
essential for getting better. We get at truth through radical transparency and
putting aside our ego barriers in order to explore our mistakes and personal
weaknesses so that we can improve.”
These three cultural cornerstones—mission, transparency, voice—were at the
forefront of our 2010 discussions of how Google should operate in China.
But we didn’t want to turn our backs on our Chinese users. Visitors to our
Google.cn page saw a message recommending they visit www.google.hk, our
site hosted in Hong Kong. When the British government returned control of
Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997, the terms of the handover were that Hong
Kong would be exempt from most mainland Chinese regulations for fifty years.
This left us thirty-seven years to be true to our culture and committed to China.
The Hong Kong site is often blocked or slowed for mainland users, but it allows
us to maintain a local, Chinese-language site for users. Within China, notifying
users when search results are censored has since become a common practice.
Our presence in search in China has dwindled, but it was the right thing to do.
CEOs like to pursue this strategy as well. Marissa Mayer, who had been
employee number 20 at Google and was instrumental in shaping our brand and
approach to search, became the CEO of Yahoo on July 16, 2012. Over the next
year, Yahoo acquired at least nineteen companies,66 including Jybe (activity and
media recommendations), Rondee (free conference calls), Snip.it (news
clipping), Summly (news summaries), Tumblr (photo blogs), Xobni (inbox and
contact list management), and Ztelic (social-network analysis). The prices for
only five of their acquisitions were disclosed, totaling $1,230,000,000 ($1.23
billion). And of the acquisitions listed here, all but Tumblr had some or all of
their products shut down once they were acquired, and their people were
integrated into Yahoo’s existing team
Buying companies and then shutting down their products is a recent Silicon
Valley phenomenon, awkwardly known as acqui-hiring.
It’s not clear yet whether acqui-hiring is a good way to build successful
organizations. First, it’s fabulously expensive: Yahoo paid $30 million for
Summly, shut it down, and fired all but three employees,67 retaining only
seventeen-year-old founder Nick D’Aloisio and two others. That’s $10 million
per person. And even when acqui-hires are “cheap,” they are still expensive: The
thirty-one Xobni employees cost $1.3 million each.68 And after all that, they still
need ongoing salaries, bonuses, and stock awards, just like other employees.
A. We hire 90th percentile performers, who start doing great work right
away.
B. We hire average performers, and through our training programs hope
eventually to turn them into 90th percentile performers.
Google was also late to the search game, as Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos,
AltaVista, AOL, and Microsoft were already major players. We had to impress
and inspire candidates, and convince them that Google had something special to
offer. But even before we could persuade people to join, we had to figure out a
new way to hire people, to ensure we had a better hiring result than other
companies.
We contracted with recruiting firms. But it was difficult for them to
understand what we were looking for, since we wanted to hire “smart
generalists” rather than experts.
To address these issues, we drastically reduced the number of interviews each
candidate went through. We also developed a white-glove service for referrals,
where referred candidates get a call within forty-eight hours and the referring
Googler is provided weekly updates on the status of their candidates. Googlers
and candidates were happier with the process, but the number of referred
candidates didn’t change. We still hadn’t solved the mystery of why we were
getting fewer referrals in the first place.
Our overreliance on referrals had simply started to exhaust Googlers’ networks.
In response, we started introducing “aided recall” exercises. Aided recall is a
marketing research technique where subjects are shown an ad or told the name
of a product and asked if they remember being exposed to it. For example, you
might be asked if you remember seeing any laundry detergent commercials in
the past month. And then you might be asked if you remember seeing any Tide
commercials. A little nudge like that always improves people’s recollections.
In the context of generating referrals, people tend to have a few people who
are top of mind. But they rarely do an exhaustive review of all the people they
know (though one Googler referred her mother—who was hired!), nor do they
have perfect knowledge of all the open jobs available. We increased the volume
of referrals by more than one-third by jogging people’s memories just as
marketers do. For example, we asked Googlers whom they would recommend
for specific roles: “Who is the best finance person you ever worked with?”
“Who is the best developer in the Ruby programming language?” We also
gathered Googlers in groups of twenty or thirty for Sourcing Jams. We asked
them to go methodically through all of their Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn contacts, with recruiters on standby to follow up immediately with great
candidates they suggested. Breaking down a huge question (“Do you know
anyone we should hire?”) into lots of small, manageable ones (“Do you know
anyone who would be a good salesperson in New York?”) garners us more,
higher-quality referrals
Today our own Google Careers website is one of our best sources of
candidates, though we’re hard at work making it even better
In other words, most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of
the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed
in the first ten seconds. “Tell me about yourself.” “What is your greatest
weakness?” “What is your greatest strength?” Worthless.
Equally worthless are the case interviews and brainteasers used by many
firms. These include problems such as: “Your client is a paper manufacturer that
is considering building a second plant. Should they?” or “Estimate how many
gas stations there are in Manhattan.” Or, most annoyingly, “How many golf balls
would fit inside a 747?” and “If I shrank you to the size of a nickel and put you
in a blender, how would you escape?”
Performance on these kinds of questions is at best a discrete skill that can be
improved through practice, eliminating their utility for assessing candidates. At
worst, they rely on some trivial bit of information or insight that is withheld
from the candidate, and serve primarily to make the interviewer feel clever and
self-satisfied. They have little if any ability to predict how candidates will
perform in a job.
The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample
test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar
to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it.
Even this can’t predict performance perfectly, since actual performance also
depends on other skills, such as how well you collaborate with others, adapt to
uncertainty, and learn. And worse, many jobs don’t have nice, neat pieces of
work that you can hand to a candidate. You can (and should) offer a work
sample test to someone applying to work in a call center or to do very taskoriented
work, but for many jobs there are too many variables involved day-today
to allow the construction of a representative work sample.
The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive
ability (26 percent). In contrast to case interviews and brainteasers, these are
actual tests with defined right and wrong answers, similar to what you might find
on an IQ test. They are predictive because general cognitive ability includes the
capacity to learn, and the combination of raw intelligence and learning ability
will make most people successful in most jobs
Tied with tests of general cognitive ability are structured interviews (26
percent), where candidates are asked a consistent set of questions with clear
criteria to assess the quality of responses. Structured interviews are used all the
time in survey research. The idea is that any variation in candidate assessment is
a result of the candidate’s performance, not because an interviewer has higher or
lower standards, or asks easier or harder questions.
There are two kinds of structured interviews: behavioral and situational. Behavioral interviews ask candidates to describe prior achievements and match
those to what is required in the current job (i.e., “Tell me about a time…?”).
Situational interviews present a job-related hypothetical situation (i.e., “What
would you do if…?”). A diligent interviewer will probe deeply to assess the
veracity and thought process behind the stories told by the candidate.
Structured interviews are predictive even for jobs that are themselves
unstructured. We’ve also found that they cause both candidates and interviewers
to have a better experience and are perceived to be most fair.89 So why don’t
more companies use them?
Welch and Conaty had implemented a 20-70-10 performance ranking system,
where GE employees were sorted into three groups: the top 20 percent, the
middle 70 percent, and the bottom 10 percent. The top workers were lionized
and rewarded with choice assignments, leadership training programs, and stock
options. The bottom 10 percent were fired. Under Immelt, the forced distribution
was softened and the crisp labels of “top 20 percent,” “middle 70 percent,” and
“bottom 10 percent” were replaced with euphemisms: “top talent,” “highly
valued,” and “needs improvement
Over time I learned that Wegmans and Google weren’t alone in their
approach. The Brandix Group is a Sri Lankan clothing manufacturer, with more
than forty plants in Sri Lanka and substantial operations in India and
Bangladesh. Ishan Dantanarayana, their chief people officer, told me that their
goal is “inspiring a large female workforce” by telling employees to “come as
you are and harness your full potential.” In addition to making their CEO and
board accessible to all employees, they provide pregnant women with
supplemental food and medicine; offer a diploma program that allows employees
to learn as they work and even trains them to be entrepreneurs and start their
own businesses; appoint worker councils in all plants to help every employee
influence the business; offer scholarships for children of employees; and more.
They also give back to the community, for example through their Water &
Women program, which builds wells in employees’ villages. “This elevates the
stature of our employees in the community, and they are then privy to clean
water, which is scarce.”
Google’s approach is to cleave the knot. We deliberately take power and
authority over employees away from managers. Here is a sample of the decisionsmanagers at Google cannot make unilaterally:
Whom to hire
Whom to fire
How someone’s performance is rated
How much of a salary increase, bonus, or stock grant to give someone
Who is selected to win an award for great management
Whom to promote
When code is of sufficient quality to be incorporated into our software code
base
The final design of a product and when to launch it
Each of these decisions is instead made either by a group of peers, a
committee, or a dedicated, independent team.
Dr. Kamal Birdi of the University of Sheffield and six other researchers
studied the productivity of 308 companies across twenty-two years and came to
a similar conclusion. These companies had all launched traditional operations
programs like “total quality management” and “just-in-time inventory control.”
Birdi found that these programs sometimes improved productivity in one
company or another, but “we found no overall performance effect” when the
companies were looked at in aggregate. In other words, there was no evidence
suggesting that any of these operations initiatives would reliably and consistently
improve performance.
So what did? Performance improved only when companies implemented
programs to empower employees (for example, by taking decision-making
authority away from managers and giving it to individuals or teams), provided
learning opportunities that were outside what people needed to do their jobs,
increased their reliance on teamwork (by giving teams more autonomy and
allowing them to self-organize), or a combination of these. These factors
“accounted for a 9% increase in value added per employee in our study
The Web in 1996 was a chaotic mess. In simplest terms, search engines
wanted to show the most relevant, useful Web pages, but ranked them mainly by
comparing the text on a Web page to the search query that was typed. That left a
loophole. The owner of a Web page could boost his rankings on search engines
with tricks like hiding popular search terms in invisible text on the page. If you
wanted people to come to your pet food site, you could write “pet food” in blue
text on a blue background a hundred times, and your search ranking would
improve. Another trick was to repeat words again and again in the source code
that generated your page but was invisible to a human reader.
Larry reasoned that an important signal was being overlooked: what users
thought of the Web page. The most useful Web pages would have lots of links
from other sites, because people would link only to the most useful pages. That
signal would prove to be far more powerful than the words written on the page
itself.
But creating a program that could identify every link on the Web and then
tabulate the strength of every relationship across all websites at the same time
was an inhumanly complex problem. Fortunately, Sergey found the problem
equally captivating. They created BackRub, a reference to the backlinks reaching
back from the site you saw to the site you had just been on. In August 1998,
Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems, famously
wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” before the company was even
incorporated. Less well known is that they moments later received a second
$100,000 check from Stanford professor David Cheriton, on whose porch they
had met Andy.24
A more recent, and less morally ambiguous, example is Mervin J. Kelly, who
joined Bell Labs in 1925 and served as president from 1951 to 1959.31 During
his tenure, Bell Labs invented lasers and solar cells, laid the first transatlantic
phone cable, developed crucial technologies that made possible the rise of the
microchip, and created the foundation for information theory through its work on
binary code systems. This built on Bell Labs’ earlier work, which included the
invention of the transistor in 1947.
A mission that matters
Google’s mission is the first cornerstone of our culture. Our mission is “to
organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful.”40 How does our mission compare to those of other companies? Here are
a few excerpts from other companies in 2013 (emphasis added):
IBM: “We strive to lead in the invention, development and manufacture
of the industry’s most advanced information technologies, including
computer systems, software, storage systems and microelectronics. We
translate these advanced technologies into value for our customers
through our professional solutions, services and consulting businesses
worldwide.”41
McDonald’s: “McDonald’s brand mission is to be our customers’ favorite
place and way to eat and drink. Our worldwide operations are aligned
around a global strategy called the Plan to Win, which center on an
exceptional customer experience—People, Products, Place, Price and
Promotion. We are committed to continuously improving our operations
and enhancing our customers’ experience.”42
Procter & Gamble: “We will provide branded products and services of
superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world’s
consumers, now and for generations to come. As a result, consumers will
reward us with leadership sales, profit and value creation, allowing our
people, our shareholders and the communities in which we live and work
to prosper.”43
These are all perfectly reasonable, responsible missions.
But two things are immediately obvious from reading these. First, I owe you
an apology for making you slog through corporate mission statements, perhaps
the worst form of literature known to man. Second, Google’s mission is
distinctive both in its simplicity and in what it doesn’t talk about. There’s no
mention of profit or market. No mention of customers, shareholders, or users. No
mention of why this is our mission or to what end we pursue these goals.
Instead, it’s taken to be self-evident that organizing information and making it
accessible and useful is a good thing
He found this effect persisted in other jobs as well. Lifeguards who read
stories about saving drowning swimmers were 21 percent more active in
watching over their swimmers. Students editing letters written by other students
spent 20 percent more time on them if they first met the authors.51
So what is Adam’s insight? Having workers meet the people they are helping
is the greatest motivator, even if they only meet for a few minutes. It imbues
one’s work with a significance that transcends careerism or money.
We all want our work to matter. Nothing is a more powerful motivator than
to know that you are making a difference in the world. Amy Wrzesniewski of
Yale University told me people see their work as just a job (“a necessity that’s
not a major positive in their lives”), a career (something to “win” or “advance”),
or a calling (“a source of enjoyment and fulfillment where you’re doing socially
useful work”).
Even the way the questions are chosen is rooted in transparency, using a tool
(awkwardly) called Hangouts On Air Q&A. Users can not only submit
questions, but also discuss and vote on them. This crowdsourcing prioritizes
questions that reflect the interests of an audience.
There are examples of companies that have pushed internal transparency
further than we have. Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund
with $145 billion in assets,56 takes one such approach: Every meeting is
recorded and made available to all employees. Bridgewater’s founder, Ray
Dalio, explains: “My most important principle is that getting at the truth… is
essential for getting better. We get at truth through radical transparency and
putting aside our ego barriers in order to explore our mistakes and personal
weaknesses so that we can improve.”
These three cultural cornerstones—mission, transparency, voice—were at the
forefront of our 2010 discussions of how Google should operate in China.
But we didn’t want to turn our backs on our Chinese users. Visitors to our
Google.cn page saw a message recommending they visit www.google.hk, our
site hosted in Hong Kong. When the British government returned control of
Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997, the terms of the handover were that Hong
Kong would be exempt from most mainland Chinese regulations for fifty years.
This left us thirty-seven years to be true to our culture and committed to China.
The Hong Kong site is often blocked or slowed for mainland users, but it allows
us to maintain a local, Chinese-language site for users. Within China, notifying
users when search results are censored has since become a common practice.
Our presence in search in China has dwindled, but it was the right thing to do.
CEOs like to pursue this strategy as well. Marissa Mayer, who had been
employee number 20 at Google and was instrumental in shaping our brand and
approach to search, became the CEO of Yahoo on July 16, 2012. Over the next
year, Yahoo acquired at least nineteen companies,66 including Jybe (activity and
media recommendations), Rondee (free conference calls), Snip.it (news
clipping), Summly (news summaries), Tumblr (photo blogs), Xobni (inbox and
contact list management), and Ztelic (social-network analysis). The prices for
only five of their acquisitions were disclosed, totaling $1,230,000,000 ($1.23
billion). And of the acquisitions listed here, all but Tumblr had some or all of
their products shut down once they were acquired, and their people were
integrated into Yahoo’s existing team
Buying companies and then shutting down their products is a recent Silicon
Valley phenomenon, awkwardly known as acqui-hiring.
It’s not clear yet whether acqui-hiring is a good way to build successful
organizations. First, it’s fabulously expensive: Yahoo paid $30 million for
Summly, shut it down, and fired all but three employees,67 retaining only
seventeen-year-old founder Nick D’Aloisio and two others. That’s $10 million
per person. And even when acqui-hires are “cheap,” they are still expensive: The
thirty-one Xobni employees cost $1.3 million each.68 And after all that, they still
need ongoing salaries, bonuses, and stock awards, just like other employees.
A. We hire 90th percentile performers, who start doing great work right
away.
B. We hire average performers, and through our training programs hope
eventually to turn them into 90th percentile performers.
Google was also late to the search game, as Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos,
AltaVista, AOL, and Microsoft were already major players. We had to impress
and inspire candidates, and convince them that Google had something special to
offer. But even before we could persuade people to join, we had to figure out a
new way to hire people, to ensure we had a better hiring result than other
companies.
We contracted with recruiting firms. But it was difficult for them to
understand what we were looking for, since we wanted to hire “smart
generalists” rather than experts.
To address these issues, we drastically reduced the number of interviews each
candidate went through. We also developed a white-glove service for referrals,
where referred candidates get a call within forty-eight hours and the referring
Googler is provided weekly updates on the status of their candidates. Googlers
and candidates were happier with the process, but the number of referred
candidates didn’t change. We still hadn’t solved the mystery of why we were
getting fewer referrals in the first place.
Our overreliance on referrals had simply started to exhaust Googlers’ networks.
In response, we started introducing “aided recall” exercises. Aided recall is a
marketing research technique where subjects are shown an ad or told the name
of a product and asked if they remember being exposed to it. For example, you
might be asked if you remember seeing any laundry detergent commercials in
the past month. And then you might be asked if you remember seeing any Tide
commercials. A little nudge like that always improves people’s recollections.
In the context of generating referrals, people tend to have a few people who
are top of mind. But they rarely do an exhaustive review of all the people they
know (though one Googler referred her mother—who was hired!), nor do they
have perfect knowledge of all the open jobs available. We increased the volume
of referrals by more than one-third by jogging people’s memories just as
marketers do. For example, we asked Googlers whom they would recommend
for specific roles: “Who is the best finance person you ever worked with?”
“Who is the best developer in the Ruby programming language?” We also
gathered Googlers in groups of twenty or thirty for Sourcing Jams. We asked
them to go methodically through all of their Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn contacts, with recruiters on standby to follow up immediately with great
candidates they suggested. Breaking down a huge question (“Do you know
anyone we should hire?”) into lots of small, manageable ones (“Do you know
anyone who would be a good salesperson in New York?”) garners us more,
higher-quality referrals
Today our own Google Careers website is one of our best sources of
candidates, though we’re hard at work making it even better
In other words, most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of
the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed
in the first ten seconds. “Tell me about yourself.” “What is your greatest
weakness?” “What is your greatest strength?” Worthless.
Equally worthless are the case interviews and brainteasers used by many
firms. These include problems such as: “Your client is a paper manufacturer that
is considering building a second plant. Should they?” or “Estimate how many
gas stations there are in Manhattan.” Or, most annoyingly, “How many golf balls
would fit inside a 747?” and “If I shrank you to the size of a nickel and put you
in a blender, how would you escape?”
Performance on these kinds of questions is at best a discrete skill that can be
improved through practice, eliminating their utility for assessing candidates. At
worst, they rely on some trivial bit of information or insight that is withheld
from the candidate, and serve primarily to make the interviewer feel clever and
self-satisfied. They have little if any ability to predict how candidates will
perform in a job.
The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample
test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar
to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it.
Even this can’t predict performance perfectly, since actual performance also
depends on other skills, such as how well you collaborate with others, adapt to
uncertainty, and learn. And worse, many jobs don’t have nice, neat pieces of
work that you can hand to a candidate. You can (and should) offer a work
sample test to someone applying to work in a call center or to do very taskoriented
work, but for many jobs there are too many variables involved day-today
to allow the construction of a representative work sample.
The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive
ability (26 percent). In contrast to case interviews and brainteasers, these are
actual tests with defined right and wrong answers, similar to what you might find
on an IQ test. They are predictive because general cognitive ability includes the
capacity to learn, and the combination of raw intelligence and learning ability
will make most people successful in most jobs
Tied with tests of general cognitive ability are structured interviews (26
percent), where candidates are asked a consistent set of questions with clear
criteria to assess the quality of responses. Structured interviews are used all the
time in survey research. The idea is that any variation in candidate assessment is
a result of the candidate’s performance, not because an interviewer has higher or
lower standards, or asks easier or harder questions.
There are two kinds of structured interviews: behavioral and situational. Behavioral interviews ask candidates to describe prior achievements and match
those to what is required in the current job (i.e., “Tell me about a time…?”).
Situational interviews present a job-related hypothetical situation (i.e., “What
would you do if…?”). A diligent interviewer will probe deeply to assess the
veracity and thought process behind the stories told by the candidate.
Structured interviews are predictive even for jobs that are themselves
unstructured. We’ve also found that they cause both candidates and interviewers
to have a better experience and are perceived to be most fair.89 So why don’t
more companies use them?
I had to read this for my HR class, and it's one of the few readings that I always looked forward to. I actually had to pace myself so that I didn't get too far ahead of where we were supposed to be in class. It's a really great book with a lot of lessons on great HR leadership and the importance of data.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Very inspiring
At several points throughout this book I felt that my expectations about it were true: a shameless Google promotion describing practices which couldn't possibly work anywhere else and are, frankly, too good to be true. But truth be told, these moments were few and far apart.
This is a great book. It is an ode to Google, no doubt about it, but it is honest and pretty humble in sharing their best practices. As the author says himself, the methods described are no rocket science and actually pretty obvious things, but they are put into practice effectively and efficiently and achieve outstanding results.
This book was an inspiration and a motivation for me and for my work. I don't want to work at Google now and I don't regard them as the pinnacle of perfection among today's companies. But I do want to try and implement their ideas, their mindset, their "just try it" approach into my work.
A solid 4 out of 5
At several points throughout this book I felt that my expectations about it were true: a shameless Google promotion describing practices which couldn't possibly work anywhere else and are, frankly, too good to be true. But truth be told, these moments were few and far apart.
This is a great book. It is an ode to Google, no doubt about it, but it is honest and pretty humble in sharing their best practices. As the author says himself, the methods described are no rocket science and actually pretty obvious things, but they are put into practice effectively and efficiently and achieve outstanding results.
This book was an inspiration and a motivation for me and for my work. I don't want to work at Google now and I don't regard them as the pinnacle of perfection among today's companies. But I do want to try and implement their ideas, their mindset, their "just try it" approach into my work.
A solid 4 out of 5
informative
inspiring
slow-paced