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.â€Â  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.â€
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: Â ”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.
January 6th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Google definitely has some intricate methods of hiring future Googlers, and I’ve had the pleasure of encountering various recruiters and managers trained in the Google way.
I interviewed for Google last October, and at the end of the process, after we both agreed I was not a good fit for a pretty much entry level position, they sent me a lengthy 15 minute survey about what I thought about the interview process, and what I thought could be improved.
Innovative, but nevertheless, I was thinking… how many people would take the time to fill out an elaborate survey after not getting a job at Google?
January 8th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
I am only curious if they are giving the same elaborate survey to their current employees. If the purpose of the survey is to predict future success at the company, then it seems that a key piece missing is creating a baseline for comparison. You’d want to hire people who match in the areas that really have contributed to success at the company. Google’s recruiting methods have always been a little controversial. And I wonder if they might be putting this in place because they realized their old methods weren’t as effective as they thought. But without a baseline for comparison, this might just be another controversial method with just as questionable results.
January 8th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
I’m with you on the baseline point. They alluded to some sort of performance measurement but didn’t say if current employees have taken or would be taking the survey.
One of the interesting things I picked up on but didn’t write about was that the company had always hired in large part based on grades – and they are moving away from that in favor of performance predicting traits. In fact, i think the guy was quoted as saying “we hired six sub 3.0 people just this past week” as proof of the change in their thinking.
January 9th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
they did have their employees complete a survey, and they used the survey results to develop the applicant survey. It’s about time they got over the only-grades-matter mentality– this is a case where Google seemed completely clueless and behind the curve.
“Last summer, Google asked every employee who had been working at the company for at least five months to fill out a 300-question survey…
When all this was completed, Dr. Carlisle set about analyzing the two million data points the survey collected. Among the first results was confirmation that Google’s obsession with academic performance was not always correlated with success at the company.”