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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.""
(Score: 2, Interesting) by darinbob on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:37AM
I have friends who work there and friends who used to work there. It does not sound like Nirvana. The early days of "do what you want" college atmosphere is mostly over, now that 15% time has to be something relevant to revenue. If you have a PhD they will expect PhD level work (ie, do more than your job requirements say, file patent applications, etc).
There is still a lot of bizarre stuff there. For instance, employees are expected to interview people who will be in other departments: that is, interview someone for a department you don't know anything about who has skills and experience that you know nothing about. The atmosphere is odd; they try a bit too hard to be hip and cool. It is more pretentious than Apple in many ways.
(Score: 1) by Chromodynamics on Wednesday March 05 2014, @10:40AM
This is done in a few other high tech companies I know of. That would just be a screening interview generally. Just see if they actually know what they are talking about. Then you will have a series of more in depth interviews that probe more deeply into the skills required for the position. Its far better to have an engineer doing the screening than some hr rep.