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posted by janrinok on Monday March 03 2014, @08:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the so-that's-how-it's-done dept.

Papas Fritas writes:

"Tom Friedman writes at the New York Times (NYT) that Google has determined that GPA's are worthless as a criteria for hiring, test scores are worthless, and brainteasers are a complete waste of time. " They don't predict anything," says Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google. "The No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not IQ. It's learning ability. It's the ability to process on the fly. It's the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they're predictive [Login required]." Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more and the least important attribute Google looks for is "expertise." "The expert will go: 'I've seen this 100 times before; here's what you do.' " Most of the time the non-expert will come up with the same answer "because most of the time it's not that hard, "says Bock, "but once in a while they'll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that."

Finally Google looks for intellectual humility. "Without humility, you are unable to learn." It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. "Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from that failure," says Bock. "What we've seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They'll argue like hell. They'll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, 'here's a new fact,' and they'll go, 'Oh, well, that changes things; you're right.' " You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.""

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by forsythe on Monday March 03 2014, @08:45PM

    by forsythe (831) on Monday March 03 2014, @08:45PM (#10223)

    And what about the value of understanding your own mastery of a subject and avoiding being "fierce" in a position that you lack trivial knowledge of? It seems as if this strategy would skip over a lot of potential candidates on the basis of what I would think of as virtues.

    Assuming that Google's hiring managers know what they're doing, it looks to me as if this is a method for hiring people who will function well in very tightly-knit groups, but not necessarily well outside them. That way they can make up for individual lack of experience with volume, as it were, and hope that there are enough genius engineers on staff to instantly catch the naive detours of each other. E.g. maybe nobody in the room knows how to sort, so A starts fumbling about with Bubblesort, but B such a wizard that he can think up Radix Sort on the spot, so no time is lost overall and now the whole team is zealous about Radix Sort.

    I can see that working decently at high levels where experience is far too rare to hire on, but I can also see it leading to a death spiral of NIH. Enough armchair analysis from me.

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