HIRING is the single most important activity in any organization. Buying the best seems like the way to go if you’re building a baseball team, but it’s much trickier if you’re building a team or company.
Most organizations run recruiting the same way: Post your job, screen resumes, interview some people, pick whom to hire. Nothing more complicated than that. If they are all recruiting the same way, why would any of them get a different outcome than their competitors?
Here are some notes on Hiring Process at Google, from Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules, former HR Manager.
Most people simply aren’t very good at interviewing. We think we are hiring the best because, after all, aren’t we great judges of character? When we start interviews, don’t we immediately size up the person and get a pretty good sense of their character and capabilities? And if we never go back and compare our interview notes (if we bothered to take any) with how people actually perform months and years later, so what? We know deep down we’ve hired the best.
But we are wrong. There’s ample data showing that:
- most assessment occurs in the first three to five minutes of an interview (or even more quickly), with the remaining time confirming that bias;
- that interviewers are subconsciously biased toward people like themselves;
- and that most interview techniques are worthless.
If an interviewer likes you, he looks for reasons to like you more. If he does not like your handshake or the awkward introduction, then the interview is essentially over because he spends the rest of the meeting looking for reasons to reject you. Psychologists call this confirmation bias, “the tendency to search for, interpret, or prioritize information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses.”
“Tell me about yourself.” “What is your greatest weakness.” “What is your greatest strength?” Worthless. Equally worthless are the case interviews and brainteasers used by many firms. Performance on these kinds of questions is at best a discrete skill that can be improved through practice, eliminating their utility in assessing candidates. At worst, they can serve primarily to make the interviewer feel clever and satisfied. They have little if any ability to predict how candidates will perform in a job.
In addition to thinking we’re superior interviewers, we convince ourselves that the candidate we select is also above average. But there’s a jarring dissonance between the dewy optimism we feel after a great interview and the tepid reality a year later, when we’re assessing his or her performance.
Designing effective training is hard. Really hard. So you cannot compensate by hiring average performers now and training people later.
Companies continue to invest substantially more in training than in hiring. Companies then turn vice into virtue by bragging how much they spend on training. Do people boast, “I’m in great shape — I spent $500 on my gym membership this month?” The presence of a huge training budget is not evidence that you’re investing in your people. It’s evidence that you failed to hire the right people to begin with.
Hiring is the most important people function you have, and most of us aren’t as good at it as we think. Refocusing your resources on hiring better will have higher return than almost any training program you can develop.
WORK RULES FOR HIRING
I have seen many instances where Manager’s made biased decisions when hiring (including myself). And also the power (implicit authority) they later get to exert on the hired Team Member. Glad this is pointed out as a must-avoid in this book.
At Google, we front-load our people investment. This means that the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires. We spend more than twice as much on recruiting, as a percentage of our people budget, as an average company. If we are better able to select people up front, that means we have less work to do with them once they are hired.
Our greatest single constraint on growth has always been our ability to find great people. It doesn’t have to cost more money, but you have to make two big changes to how you think about hiring.
HIRE MORE SLOWLY: Only 10 percent of your applicants (at best!) will be top performers, so you go through far more applicants and interviews. The top performers in most industries aren’t looking for work, precisely because they are top performers who are enjoying their success right where they are. So your odds of hiring a great person based on inbound applications are low. But it’s worth the wait.
ONLY HIRE PEOPLE WHO ARE BETTER THAN YOU: All of the people I hired could do my job tomorrow. I learn from them every week. And I waited a long time to hire each one.
In addition to being willing to take longer, to wait for someone better than you, you also need managers to give up the power when it comes to hiring. Managers want to pick their own teams. But even the best intentioned managers compromise their standards as searches drag on. Even worse, individual managers can be biased. They want to hire a friend or take on an intern as a favour to an executive or a big client. Finally, letting managers make hiring decisions gives them too much power over the people on their teams.
Superb hiring isn’t just about recruiting the biggest name, top salesperson, or cleverest engineer. It’s about finding the very best people who will be successful in the contest of your organisation, and who will make around them more successful.
While these two suggestions may seem like applying only to technology companies at the bleeding edge, one can see broader applicability if only we are willing to look closely at our hiring process?
MAKE RECRUITING PART OF EVERYONE’S JOB
Google is complemented as world’s first self replicating talent machine. That’s a nice way of looking at recruiting. I also enjoyed reading about how Google took referrals to the next level .. something we so often see given lip service in many organizations.
Best source of candidates can be referrals from existing employees. What to do when rate at which employees were making referrals decline? Google increased the bonus from 2000 USD to 4000 USD. That did not help. It turned out that nobody was meaningfully motivated by the referral bonus.
A referral bonus is an extrinsic motivator. Other extrinsic motivators include public recognition, salary increases, promotions, trophies, and trips. This is in contrast to intrinsic motivators, which come from inside yourself. Examples of these include a desire to give back to your family or community, slaking your curiosity, or the sense of accomplishment or pride that comes from completing a difficult task. What we learned is that Googlers were making referrals for intrinsic reasons. Offering 10000 USD too would not have helped.
If people were making referrals for intrinsic reasons, why did the referral rate slow down? Were people having less fun at Google? Were we straying from our mission?
No. We were just doing a really poor job of managing referrals. To address this, we drastically reduced the number of interviews each candidate went through (20 to 6?). We also developed a white-glove service for referrals, where referred candidates get a call within 48 hours and referring Googler is provided weekly updates on the status of their candidates.
Googlers were happy with this change. But this too din’t change referral rate.
Realization — our employees don’t know everyone in the world.
In response, we started introducing “aided recall” exercises. Aided recall is a marketing research technique where subjects are shown an ad or told the name of a product and asked if they remember being exposed to it. In the context of generating referrals, people tend to have a few people who are top of mind. But they rarely do an exhaustive review of all the people they know, nor do they have perfect knowledge of all the open jobs available. We increased the volume of referrals by more than one-third by jogging people’s memories just as marketers do. For example, we asked Googlers whom they would recommend for specific roles. “Who is the best finance person you ever worked with?” “Who is the best developer in Ruby programming language.”
We also gathered Googlers in groups of twenty or thirty for Sourcing Jams. We asked them to go methodically through all of their G+, Facebook, and LinkedIn contacts, with recruiters on standby to follow up immediately with great candidates they suggested.
Breaking down a huge question (“Do you know anyone we should hire?”) into lots of small, manageable ones (“Do you know anyone who would be a good salesperson in NY?”) garners us more, higher-quality referrals.
Can Referral Rate be a good leading metric to understand if we are indeed on the growing path of employee engagement and creating the best workplace?
INSIGHTS FROM GOOGLE INTERVIEW PROCESS
If you are committed to transforming your team or your organization, hiring better is the single best way to do it. It takes will and patience, but it works. Be willing to concentrate your people investment on hiring. And never settle.
Goal of our interview process is to predict how candidates will perform once they join the team. We achieve that goal by doing what the science says: combining behavioral and structural interviews with assessment of cognitive ability, conscientiousness, and leadership.
Work Sample Test
The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test. This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in a job, and assessing their performance at it. Even this can’t predict performance perfectly, since actual performance also depends on other skills, such as how well you collaborate with others, adapt to uncertainty, and learn. All our technical hires, whether in engineering or product management, go through a work sample test of sorts.
Assessment of Cognitive Ability
These are actual tests with defined right and wrong answers, similar to what you might find in IQ tests. They are predictive because general cognitive ability includes the capacity to learn, and the combination of raw intelligence and learning ability will make most people successful in most jobs. They are however not great by themselves.
Structured Interviews
Candidates are asked a consistent set of questions with clear criteria to assess the quality of responses. There are two kinds of structured interviews: behavioral and situational. Behavioral interviews ask candidates to describe prior achievements and match those to what is required in the current job (i.e., “Tell me about a time … ?”). Situational interviews present a job-related hypothetical situation (i.e., “What would you do if …?”). A diligent interviewer will probe deeply to assess the veracity and thought process behind the stories told by the candidate.
- Tell me about a time your behaviour had a positive impact on your team. (Followups: What was your primary goal and why? How did your teammates respond? Moving forward, what’s your plan?)
- Tell me about a time when you effectively managed your team to achieve a goal. What did your approach look like? (Followups: What were your targets and how did you meet them as an individual and as a team? How did you adapt your leadership approach to different individuals? What was the key takeaway from this specific situation?)
- Tell me about a time you had difficulty working with someone (can be a coworker, classmate, client). What made this person difficult to work with for you? (Followups: What steps did you take to resolve the problem? What was the outcome? What could you have done differently?)
Structured interviews can cause both candidate and interviewers to have a better experience and are perceived to be most fair. So why don’t most companies use them? Well, they are hard to develop. You have to write them, test them, and make sure interviewers stick to them. And then you have to continuously refresh them. It’s a lot of work, but the alternative is to waste everyone’s time with a typical interview that is either subjective, or discriminatory, or both.
Assessment of Conscientiousness
People who score high on conscientiousness “work to completion” — meaning they don’t stop until a job is done rather than quitting at good enough — are more likely to feel responsible for their teams and the environment around them. In other words, they are more likely to act like owners rather than employees.
Scoring the Interview
We use a consistent rubric to score the interviews. For example, we have five generic components for general cognitive ability. For each component, the interviewer has to indicate how the candidate did, and each performance level is clearly defined. The interviewer then has to write exactly how the candidate demonstrated their general cognitive ability, so later reviewers can make their own assessment.
Think about the last five people you interviewed for a similar job. Did you give them similar questions or did each person get different questions? Did you cover everything you needed to with each of them, or did you run out of time? Did you hold them to exactly the same standard, or were you tougher on one because you were tired, cranky, and having a bad day? Did you write up detailed notes so that other interviewers could benefit from your insights?
A concise hiring rubric addresses all these issues because it distills messy, vague, and complicated work situations down to measurable, comparable results.
Leave Time for Conversation
Remember too that you don’t just want to assess the candidate. You want them to fall in love with you. Really. You want them to have a great experience, have their concerns addressed, and come away feeling like they just had the best day of their lives. Interviews are awkward because you’re having an intimate conversation with someone you just met, and the candidate is in a very vulnerable position. It’s always worth investing time to make sure they feel good at the end of it, because they will tell other people about their experience — and because it’s the right way to treat people.
Sometimes this is as simple as leaving time for conversation. It’s too easy in an interview to focus on your needs. You’re busy and need to assess this person as fast as you can. But they’re making a big decision than you are. After all, companies have many employees, but a person has only one job.
Survey every Interviewee
Following the interview, we survey every interviewee to find out what they thought of the process, and later use their feedback to adjust our process accordingly.
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