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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: 1) by darinbob on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:10PM
This is not exactly how I heard it from friends, but I'll assume I misheard it.
Anyway it is still weird in that almost every other company hires for a specific job, and no one is called in for an interview unless there is a job opening and a job req. Otherwise what happens when the candidate passes the first hurdles but then there's no job this person can do, or the job they wanted to do is full? Or worse they really want to do X but are then told that their job is doing Y, which they haer an expert in but hate doing.
Why wait until after the interview to find out if there's actually a job opening that you want? It's wasted time for the candidate.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:38AM
In a company the size and expansion rate of Google, there is pretty much guaranteed to be a job if they can find someone to fill it. Their hiring process is heavily biased towards false negatives (on the assumption that a bad hire will do more damage to the company than failing to hire anyone), and Google is always expanding into new areas, so almost all of the teams are growing. They have groups ranging from low-level realtime control software for robots to web UI design, so there's likely to be a team where anyone competent could make a contribution.
The only difficulty that they sometimes have is not having a specific kind of job in a specific location. I was offered the choice of doing things I wanted to do in either London, Munich, or Mountain View (where I didn't want to live), or doing something that didn't sound as fun in Paris (where I did want to go). I took the third option and went back to academia in Cambridge (and now collaborate quite closely with a couple of teams in Google and spend part of my time on a Google-funded project).
The down side is that you have absolutely no idea, going in, what the job that your interviewing for actually is. Your interviewer most likely doesn't either, but part of their job is to give feedback on the kinds of position that you'd be a good fit for.
sudo mod me up