MOUNTAIN VIEW: Last June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The New York Times, Laszlo Bock,
the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e, the guy in charge of hiring for
one of the world's most successful companies — noted that Google had determined
that "GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are
worthless. ... We found that they don't predict anything."
He also noted that the "proportion of people without any college education
at Google has increased over time" — now as high as 14% on some teams. At
a time when many people are asking, "How's my kid gonna get a job?" I
thought it would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer.
Don't get him wrong, Bock begins, "Good grades certainly
don't hurt." 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.
"There are five hiring
attributes we have across the company," explained Bock. "If it's a
technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the
company are technical roles. For every job, though, 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."
The second, he added, "is
leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional
leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club?
Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don't care.
What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you're a member of a team,
do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do
you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what's
critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be
willing to relinquish power."
What else? Humility and ownership.
"It's feeling the sense of
responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in," he said, to try to
solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas
of others. "Your end goal," explained Bock, "is what can we do
together to problem-solve. I've contributed my piece, and then I step
back."
And it is not just humility in
creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it's "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," Bock said.
"They, instead, commit the
fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it's because
I'm a genius. If something bad happens, it's because someone's an idiot or I
didn't get the resources or the market moved. ... 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.
The least important attribute they
look for is "expertise." Said Bock: "If you take somebody who
has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has
emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an HR person or finance
person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone
who's been doing just one thing and is a world expert, 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, added Bock, "because
most of the time it's not that hard." Sure, once in a while they will mess
it up, he said, but once in a while they'll also come up with an answer that is
totally new. And there is huge value in that.
To sum up Bock's approach to
hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many
nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one -
besides brand-name colleges. Because "when you look at people who don't go
to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings.
And we should do everything we can to find those people." Too many
colleges, he added, "don't deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton
of debt, you don't learn the most useful things for your life. It's [just] an
extended adolescence."
Google attracts so much talent it
can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like GPA. For most young people,
though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the
tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them,
too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The
world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know
(and it doesn't care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is
increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills —
leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and
re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.
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