“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).”
How to Get a Job at Google
FEB. 22, 2014
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.