Not to keep flogging the Google horse or anything, but it appears the company is doing some innovative stuff beyond its products. The company has gained some HR-related attention before for using billboards featuring complex mathematical problems to recruit engineers. Now, they’ve turned their attention to candidate screening.

According to this NYT article, the company is exploring new methods for hiring “more well-rounded candidates, like those who have published books or started their own clubs.”  They will now be asking the 100,000 job applicants each month to fill out an “elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.”

The company then takes the surveys and compares them against some 25 different measures of employee performance. By doing so, they hope to expose the traits that make for successful employees so they can more readily find the gems amongst the thousands of applications they get each day.

I just think they are just right on with this. As I recently posted on Dave Lefkow’s blog:  ”When performance is the heart of the effort, you can come to a recruiting system from a new perspective. Instead of focusing only on traditional recruiting metrics like time to hire – you can start to think about and track the actual performance of each new hire over time. Then, you can identify what makes for higher performing candidates and build that knowledge into a system that helps you source and hire more like them.”

Interestingly, Dave wondered “…if the market is ready for this – right now, recruiters are measured on efficiency, not effectiveness. It’s all about getting bodies in seats, and introducing a measure of quality that recruiters are tied to would require a big mindset shift. I can hear the groans now – but I don’t make the decisions about who to hire. That’s the hiring manager. Buck passed.”

Google is no representation of the market at large. But as a pioneer in many ways, they often pick up on trends before others. Perhaps their talent approaches are equally visionary.