How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

The most important skill any business person can develop is interviewing.

in practice your job is to determine a candidate’s merit in the context of an artificial, time-constrained interview. That calls for a unique and difficult skill set, and

the simple truth is most people are not good at it.

Meetings are indeed how we spend the majority of our time. The nice thing about meetings is that the higher up you are on the food chain, the less you have to prepare for them.

Conducting a good interview requires something different: preparation.

Being a good interviewer requires understanding the role, reading the résumé, and—most important—considering your questions.

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

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 c...

Get her to show off her thinking, not just her résumé.

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

If the answers you get are cut and pasted from marketing claims, or are simply the reflection of commonly held wisdom, then you have a generic candidate,

one who will not be adept at thinking deepl...

The brainteasers also became a lightning rod for criticism as an elitist tool. To those critics, let us say once and for all: You are right.

We want to hire the best minds available, because we believe there is a big difference between people who are great and those who are good, and we will do everything we can to separate the two.

This section is fascinating...not sure the response would be the same in today's environment due to external considerations. Not a lot of humility here!

The only way to get good at interviewing is to practice.

not everyone is good at interviewing,

and people who don’t want to get good at it won’t.

At Google we implemented a trusted-interviewer program, an elite team of people who were actually good at interviewing and liked to do it, and they got to do the bulk of the work (and were rew...

Who says you have to spend the rest of the hour making useless conversation? What a waste of time.

That’s why 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 mak...

The shorter interview time forces a conversation that’s more protein and less fat;

Not only do most companies conduct overlong interviews, they conduct too many of them.

after four interviews the incremental cost of conducting additional interviews outweighs the value the additional feedback contributes to the ultimate hiring decision.

Remember: From the interviewer’s standpoint, the goal of the interview is to form an opinion. A strong opinion. A yes or no.

We encourage interviewers to take a stand.

The language assigned to these scores was deliberately emotional—“expect to hear from me”—because smart creatives care about who joins their team.

It’s as if they are inviting someone into their family. They believe every interview must lead to a decision, and that decision is personal.

When you tell people to have an opinion, though, you need to tell them what t...

Leadership:

Role-Related Knowledge:

General cognitive ability:

We’re less concerned about grades and transcripts and more interested in how a candidate thinks.

Googleyness:

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.

Hiring decisions are too important to be left in the hands of a manager who may or may not have a stake in the employee’s success a year later.

That’s why at Google we set up the process so that the hiring decision is made by committee. With hiring committees, it doesn’t matter who you are: If you want to hire someone, the decision needs approval from a hiring committee, wh...

The process was designed to optimize for quality, not efficiency, and for control, not scale. Over the years, we have done our best to make it scale efficiently anyway, but our original tenet still stands, even as we pass forty-five thousand employees:

Nothing is more important than the quality of hiring.

The unit of currency in this s...

hiring p...

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, so that all members of the hiring committee get the exact same information,...

When completed, the ideal hiring packet is stuffed to the brim with data, not opinion, and this distinction is critical.

If you are the hiring manager or one of the interviewers, it isn’t sufficient to express an opinion;

you need to support it ...

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 people who get hired are the ones with the best packets, not the loudest cheerleaders on the committee.