How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

You cannot be gender-, race-, and color-blind by fiat; you need to create empirical, objective methods to measure people. Then the best will thrive, regardless of where they’re from and what they look like.

A typical hiring manager will have a narrow aperture, considering only certain people with certain titles in certain fields, those who will undoubtedly do today’s job well. But the successful manager sets a wider aperture and rounds up people beyond the usual suspects.

The engineer who wants to move into product management, but is blocked from leaving his team; the product manager who wants to get into sales, but there’s no open headcount. You can get great talent if you are willing to take a risk on people by challenging them to do new things. They will join you precisely because you are willing to take that risk. And those willing to take risks introduce the exact self-selection tendency you are looking for.

if you’re hiring a software engineer and all your code is written in a certain language, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should hire an expert in that language. You should hire the best engineer you can find, regardless of her coding preference, because if she’s the best she can down enough Java to C how to make the Python Go.107 And when the language of choice changes (it inevitably will) she’ll be able to adapt better than anyone else.

One way to make expanding the aperture work is to judge candidates based on trajectory.

the best people are often the ones whose careers are climbing, because when you project their path forward there is potential for great growth and achievement. There are plenty of strong, experienced people who have hit a plateau. With those candidates, you know exactly what you are getting (which is good) but there is much less potential for the extraordinary (bad).

It’s important to note that age and trajectory are not correlated, and that there are exceptions to the trajectory guideline, such as people running their own busine...

today technology has rendered the environment so dynamic that having the right experience is only a part of what it takes to succeed. Companies consistently overvalue relevant experience when judging senior candidates. They should be more focused on what talented smart creatives have to offer.

We needed executives who understood how to build scalable engines on which a company could run at a fundamentally different pace.

suggested that the right combination might be McKinsey partner + Rhodes scholar,

Expanding the aperture brings risks. It leads to some failures, and the start-up costs for hiring a brilliant, inexperienced person are higher than those of hiring a less-brilliant, experienced one. The hiring manager may not want to bear the costs, but such concerns need to be set aside for the greater good. Hiring brilliant generalists is far better for the company.

If everyone knows someone great, why isn’t it everyone’s job to recruit that great person?

Establishing a successful hiring culture that delivers a steady stream of outstanding people starts with understanding the role of recruiters in sourcing candidates. Hint: It isn’t their exclusive realm.

The simple way to keep recruiting in everyone’s job description is to measure it. Count referrals and interviews. Measure how quickly people fill out interview feedback forms. Encourage employees to help with recruiting events, and track how often they do. Then make these metrics count when it comes to performance reviews and promotions.

Your objective is to find the limits of his capabilities, not have a polite conversation, but the interview shouldn’t be an overly stressful experience. The best interviews feel like intellectual discussions between friends (“What books are you reading right now?”). Questions should be large and complex, with a range of answers (to draw out the person’s thought process) that the interviewer can push back on (to see how the candidate stakes out and defends a position). It’s a good idea to reuse questions across candidates, so you can calibrate responses.

When asking about a candidate’s background, you want to ask questions that, rather than offering her a chance to regurgitate her experiences, allow her to express what insights she gained from them. Get her to show off her thinking, not just her résumé. “What surprised you about…?” is one good way to approach this, as it is just different enough to surprise a candidate, so you don’t get rehearsed responses, and forces her to think about her experiences from a slightly different perspective. “How did you pay for college?” is another good one, as is “If I were to look at the web history section of your browser, what would I learn about you that isn’t on your résumé?” Both of these can lead to a far better understanding of the candidate. They are also quite specific, which helps you gauge how well someone listens and parses questions.

Scenario questions are often helpful, but more so when interviewing more senior people, because they can reveal how a person will use or trust their own staff. For example, “When you are in a crisis, or...

Generic answers to these questions indicate someone who lacks insight on issues. You want the answers to be interesting or at least specific.

A highly qualified candidate is evaluating you as much as you are evaluating her. If you waste the first few minutes of the interview reading her résumé and making small talk, the candidate who is considering several options (and the great candidates always have several options) may not be impressed. First impressions work both ways.

you should also identify the candidates who ask thoughtful questions. People who ask good questions are curious, smarter, more flexible and interesting, and understand that they don’t have all the answers—exactly the type of smart-creative characteristics you want.

Product managers who wanted to be in the program had to go through interview training and shadow a minimum of four interviewers as they met with candidates. Once in the program they were scored on a variety of performance metrics, including how many interviews they conducted, reliability (it’s amazing how many people think it’s OK to cancel interviews at the last minute, or not even show up), and quality and promptness of their feedback (quality of feedback declines precipitously after forty-eight hours; our best interviewers schedule time to enter their feedback right after the interview). We published these stats and let people not in the program “challenge” the incumbents and replace them if their performance was better. In other words, not interviewing was seen as punishment. With this program, interviewing became a privilege, not a chore, and quality increased across the board.

Google interviews are a half hour. Most interviews will result in a no-hire decision, so you want to invest less time in them, and most good interviewers can make that negative call in a half hour.

If you like the candidate and want to keep talking, you can always schedule another interview or choose to make time in your calendar right then and there (easy to do if you have scheduled the following fifteen minutes to write up your feedback). The shorter interview time forces a conversation that’s more protein and less fat; there’s no time for small talk or meaningless questions. It forces people, including (especially!) you, into a substantive discussion.

we grade interview candidates on a scale of 1 to 4. The average score falls around a 3, which translates to “I’ll be okay with this person getting an offer, but someone else should like them a lot.” As an average, 3 is fine, but as an individual response it’s a cop-out, since what it really means is that the interviewer can’t make up his mind and is passing the buck to someone else to decide. We encourage interviewers to take a stand.

on the product management team the score of 4.0 meant “This person is perfect for this role. If you don’t hire them, expect to hear from me.”

we break down candidate evaluations into four different categories, and we keep these categories consistent across functions.

smart creatives tend to score well on all of these, regardless of what they do or at what level.

Leadership: We’ll want to know how someone has flexed different muscles in various situations in order to mobilize a team. This can include asserting a leadership role at work or with an organization, or even helping a team succeed when they weren’t officially appointed as the leader.

Role-Related Knowledge: We look for people who have a variety of strengths and passions, not just isolated skill sets. We also want to make sure that candidates have the experience and the background that will set them up for success in the role.

General cognitive ability: We’re less concerned about grades and transcripts and more interested in how a candidate thinks. We’re likely to ask a candidate some role-related questions that provide insight into how they solve problems.

Googleyness: We want to get a feel for what makes a candidate unique. We also want to make sure this is a place they’ll thrive, so we look for signs around their comfort with ambiguity, bias to action, and collaborative nature.

in the most effective organizations, who you work for matters a lot less than who you work with.

the hiring decision is made by committee.

The primary criterion for serving on a hiring committee is that you will not be driven by anything other than what is best for the company, period.

Committees should have enough members to allow a good range of viewpoints, but should be small enough to allow an efficient process; four or five is a pretty good number.

The best composition promotes a wide variety of perspectives, so aim for diversity: in seniority, in skills and strengths (since people will often favor peopl...

The hiring committee ensures that people don’t hire their friends, unless those friends happen to be superstars.

The unit of currency in this system is the hiring packet, a document containing all the known information about a candidate who has progressed through the interview process. A hiring packet needs to be both comprehensive and standardized,

When completed, the ideal hiring packet is stuffed to the brim with data, not opinion,

supporting every opinion with data or empirical observations tends to be a lot harder than this example. But when people don’t do it, packets get kicked out of the committee.

The other important rule is that the packet is the only source of information for the hiring committee. If something isn’t in the packet, it doesn’t get considered. This forces people to be thorough in constructing a hiring packet.

The best packets are like any other great piece of executive communications: a one-page summary with all the key facts, and comprehensive supporting material. The summary consists of hard data and evidence in support of the hiring decision, and the supporting material includes interview reports, résumé, compensation history, reference information (especially if the candidate was sourced via internal reference), and any other relevant material (college transcripts, copy of a candidate’s patents or awards, writing or coding samples).

In compiling a hiring packet, details matter.

The packet also needs to be well formatted and easy to read quickly; for example, the candidate’s best or worst answers should be highlighted for easy reference. But not everything should be formatted: A candidate’s original résumé should be included as is, so everyone can see the typos and formatting errors (or bold or italic fonts). Getting all of these details of the packet right is what enables the committee to get the details of the candidate right.

Even a purely data-based packet can lie, though. Interviewers have natural biases—one

The solution to this? More data. Stipulate that all packets include statistics on each interviewer’s past scores—including number of interviews, range of scores, and mean—so committee members can factor into their decision-making which interviewers grade ...

deciding who gets promoted should also be via a committee rather than a top-down management decision. Our managers can nominate their people for promotion and act as advocates throughout the process, but the decision itself is out of their hands.

We keep interviews at a half hour and limit ourselves to five per candidate.

In the inevitable showdown between speed and quality, quality must prevail.

Top performers get paid well in athletics, and they should in business too. If you want better performance from the best, celebrate and reward it disproportionately.