How to Get a Job at Google
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.
Thomas L. Friedman
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.
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