MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — LAST June, in an interview
with Adam Bryant of The 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 “G.P.A.’s 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
percent 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 I.Q.
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,” said
Bock.
“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 H.R. 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 nonexpert 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 G.P.A. 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.
