Google’s Thoughts on Hiring

Today Stephen Fleming shared a tweet that pointed to this NY Times article discussing Google’s thoughts on hiring. My head has been full of similar thoughts this year as we’ve been growing AccelerEyes, so the article resonated with me. Here are the particular parts that stood out to me:

Brainteasers are a complete waste of time; they serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.
What works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.
Asking a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem,” yields not only directly useful information, but also the meta information about what kinds of things the candidate considers to be difficult.
For leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. This leads to employees having great freedom to work within those consistent parameters. Leaders that are erratic lead to a cultural feeling of restrictiveness.
Upward feedback surveys are very beneficial for improving the quality of leadership within the organization, where employees grade their managers on areas such as: the manager treats me with respect, the manager gives me clear goals, the manager shares information, the manager treats the entire team fairly.
GPAs and test scores are useless hiring indicators because academic environments are artificial environments. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

These are all great thoughts from Google and resonate with many of the same things we’ve discovered at AccelerEyes.

What indicators do you use in evaluating new hires?

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