How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

Pay attention to how they are passionate.

when you get people talking about their passions, the guard usually comes down and you gain more insight into their personalities.

“information technology’s growing exponentially… And our intuition about the future is not exponential, it’s linear.”

Perhaps I could add this Ray Kurzweil quote to my slide with this graph?

In our experience raw brainpower is the starting point for any exponential thinker. Intelligence is the best indicator of a person’s ability to handle change.

Henry Ford said that “anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.”

Our ideal candidates are the ones who prefer roller coasters, the ones who keep learning. These “learning animals” have the smarts to handle massive change and the character to love it.

“growth mi...

if you have a growth mindset, you believe the qualities that define you can be modified and cultivated through effort. You can change yourself; you can adapt; in fact, you are more comfortable and do better when you are forced to do so.

If you think your abilities are fixed, you’ll set for yourself what she calls

“performance goals”

to maintain that self-image, but if you have a growth m...

“learning...

goals that’ll drive you to take risks without worrying ...

Most people, when they are hiring for a role, look for people who have excelled in that role before.

This is not how you find a learning animal.

Peruse virtually any job listing and one of the top criteria for a position will...

Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it’s a given the role for which you’re hiring is going to change.

Yesterday’s widget will be obsolete tomorrow, and hiring a specialist in such a dynamic environment can backfire.

Finding learning animals can be a challenge.

Jonathan’s modus operandi is to ask candidates to reflect on a past mistake.

The point is not to see if someone was prescient, but rather how she evolved her thinking and learned from her mistakes.

Few people answer this question well, but when they do, it’s a great indication that you’re talking to a learning animal.

Once you hire those learning animals, keep learning them!

Create opportunities for every employee to be constantly learning new things—even skills and experiences that aren’t directly beneficial to the company—and then expect them to use them.

So, passion is crucial in a potential hire, as is intelligence and a learning-animal mindset. Another crucial quality is character.

Someone who is interesting.

We usually ask our assistants what they think of candidates, and listen to their response.

As important as character, though, is whether or not a candidate is interesting.

has to be someone you could have an interesting conversation with and respect.

However, he or she is not necessarily someone you have to like.

Truth be told, some of our most effective colleagues are people we most definitely would not want to have a beer with.

You must work with people you don’t like, because a workforce comprised of people who are all “best office buddies” can be homogeneous,

and homogeneity in an organization br...

A multiplicity of viewpoints—aka diversity—is your best defe...

These differences of perspective generate insights that can’t be taught.

When you bring them together in a work environment, they integrate to create a broader perspective that is priceless.

Great talent often doesn’t look and ...

The same goes for managing people once they join you. Just like hiring, managing performance should be driven by data, with the sole objective of creating a meritocracy.

There are four links in this critical chain:

sourcing, interviewing, hiring, and compensation.

sour...

which in turn starts with defining the type of candidate for w...

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.

Companies consistently overvalue relevant experience when judging senior candidates. They should be more focused on what talented smart creatives have to offer.

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 f...

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

the job of finding people belongs to everyone, and this fact needs to be woven into the fabric of the company.