On 10/11/06, Udhay Shankar N <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Madhu Menon wrote [at 12:31 PM 10/11/2006] :
>...especially user interface people.
>
>http://tinyurl.com/pcyvq
I said this earlier today, in an email to somebody who sent me this URL:
>I gave a piece of my mind to a google chap (friend of a friend, who
>wanted gyan on how to recruit people) a couple of years ago.
>
>This chap was from the Bay Area, and was trying to find out why
>google was having such a hard time recruiting here. My impressions:
>
>1. The obvious first - it's a hot job market, and you're competing
>with all the other companies out there.
>2. google makes a big deal out of hiring the "best of the best"
>which is almost meaningless, in my view. "Best" by whose definition?
>In what arena? And how long will that last? - anyway, be that as it
>may, I do know that this attitude has pissed off several potential
>hires, which might be a pointer to their current hiring difficulties...
I think Google is listening :-) (Overquoting for context)
--
Google Adjusts Hiring Process As Needs Grow
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB116156296729900433.html
--
Google Inc.'s recruiting process is legendary in Silicon Valley.
Tales abound of job candidates who suffered through a dozen or
more in-person interviews, and applicants with years of work
experience who were spurned after disclosing they had so-so
college grades.
Now Google is attempting to fine tune its approach toward hiring
staff. In addition to making the experience less grueling for
would-be employees, it hopes to do a better job of offering the
right jobs to the right people as it continues its rapid expansion.
Google has long attributed much of its success to its ability to
attract bright minds and to build a culture where those hires can
excel. But in February 2005, Google co-founder Sergey Brin
acknowledged to analysts that the company's high bar for hiring
was holding back its expansion.
This past March, the Mountain View, Calif., company brought
in a new head of human resources, former General Electric Co.
executive Laszlo Bock, who also worked at the consulting firm
McKinsey & Co. Under Mr. Bock, Google launched a large-scale
survey of current employees, seeking to identify the factors that
correlate with success at the company. "Everything works if
you're trying to hire 500 people a year or 1,000," says
Mr. Bock, 33 years old. But "we're hiring much larger numbers
than that, and so it forces us to go back and say...what do we
need to change in the way we interface with our candidates?"
One initiative Google has already undertaken is reducing the
number of interviews. Mr. Bock says each candidate offered a
job by Google went through 5.1 in-person interviews on average
in June, down from 6.2 at the beginning of the year. (A veteran
tech recruiter says five to eight interviews is probably about
average for Silicon Valley.) Google is also considering requiring
staff members who interview candidates to submit their
assessments within a week of the interview; right now,
there's no strict deadline.
he recruiting fine-tuning is a further sign that Google's
in-house processes are in transition from those of a start-up to
those of a big business. The eight-year-old company had 9,378
employees at the end of the third quarter, and analysts project
that its revenue will top $10 billion this year. During the quarter,
the company brought in an average of 16 new employees daily,
up from 13 the quarter before. Its breakneck hiring has boosted
staff from 1,628 at the end of 2003 to 3,021 a year later and
5,680 at the end of 2005.
In Google's early years, Mr. Brin or co-founder Larry Page
interviewed nearly all job candidates before they were officially
hired. A former Google executive recounts how, on occasion,
Mr. Brin would show up for candidates' job interviews in
unconventional dress, from roller blades to a cow costume
complete with rubber udders around Halloween. Even today, at
least one of the co-founders reviews every job offer recommended
by an internal hiring committee on a weekly basis, sometimes
pushing back with questions about an individual's qualifications.
People close to the company say it has traditionally focused a
lot on candidates' academic performance and favored those who
went to elite schools. Mr. Bock says that college grade-point
average is a factor, and that most hires have done well
academically. But he says there's no formal GPA requirement,
and he points to new staff members who don't have college
degrees but do have solid professional track records.
Recent candidates say the process can still drag on. "The
process from a candidate's perspective is glacial," says one
who was interviewed for a senior nonengineering position this
year. After each of two in-person interviews, the candidate
went more than a month without hearing from Google and
finally accepted a job offer from another company.
Daniel Bernstein, 24 years old, recently interviewed for a
corporate communications job at Google. After initial contact in
May and two phone interviews, he was invited to headquarters,
where he had separate interviews with about half-a-dozen people,
was treated to lunch in the cafeteria and was handed a goodie
bag with a Google T-shirt, notebook and pen. He also turned
in several "homework" assignments, including a personal
statement and a marketing plan for a future Google product.
In August, Google called Mr. Bernstein back for a second round,
which he says would have entailed four or five more interviews.
In the meantime, though, he had decided he wanted to work at
a start-up, and he had already accepted a job offer at Meebo Inc.,
a Web-based instant-messaging provider.
Mr. Bock declines to comment on specific cases, but he says
Google tries "to strike the right balance between letting
candidates get to know Google, letting us get to know them, and
moving quickly." He adds that the average time it takes Google
to make an offer has dropped significantly over the last few months
and that the "ideal would be that for at least some roles, we can
make offers the same day people interview."
In the survey Google conducted in June, current employees
were questioned on about 300 variables, including their performance
on standardized tests, the age at which they first used a computer,
how many foreign languages they spoke, how many patents they
had and whether they had ever been published. Mr. Bock's team
mapped the answers against 30 or 40 job-performance factors for
each survey-taker, identifying clusters of variables that Google
might focus on more during the hiring process.
The approach isn't without risk. "To do that carefully is really
hard, and you could wind up with measures that are spurious"
or make hiring worse, says Peter Cappelli, a management
professor and director of the Center for Human Resources at
the University of Pennsylvania' s Wharton School.
So far, Google is experimenting with changes, such as
additional short questionnaires for applicants and different
interview formats. The company is also considering trying
out an abbreviated hiring process, which would allow it to
make an offer to some candidates after just two interviews.
Google is also moving from a format in which interviewers
provided candidate feedback using free-form text and could
give only one overall score to a format in which they offer
targeted feedback grouped around four attributes (Google
declines to name them) and multiple scores rating a
candidate's knowledge, skills and abilities.
For the short questionnaires, Google has identified useful
queries about a candidate's past, personality variables and
workstyle preferences. Examples include: Have you ever
turned a profit at your own nontech side business (dog walker,
catering, tutoring, etc.)? How strongly would you describe
yourself as someone with an assertive personality? At work
would you prefer to manage others or do the work yourself?
But there's bad news for some job candidates, too. In July,
Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told analysts the
company was "able to now in fact increase the standards
by which we select and hire new people." While Mr. Bock
says it's hard to say specifically how Google has raised the
bar, he adds that his own team is looking for people for
human-resources jobs who "can be promoted four, five,
six times" and that other departments also hire people who
are overqualified for the specific position they're recruited for.
Mr. Bock says that the company's brisk growth means that
the scope of any position generally expands rapidly.
-- Vinayak
