Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

by Laszlo Bock

We thought requesting grades and transcripts was a blunt instrument to get at smarts. And it did weed out the disappointing number of people who lied about their records. But in 2010, our analyses revealed that academic performance didn’t predict job performance beyond the first two or three years after college, so we stopped requiring grades and transcripts except from recent graduates.

We increased the volume of referrals by more than one-third by jogging people’s memories just as marketers do. For example, we asked Googlers whom they would recommend for specific roles: “Who is the best finance person you ever worked with?” “Who is the best developer in the Ruby programming language?”

The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it.

The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent). In contrast to case interviews and brainteasers, these are actual tests with defined right and wrong answers, similar to what you might find on an IQ test. They are predictive because general cognitive ability includes the capacity to learn, and the combination of raw intelligence and learning ability will make most people successful in most jobs. The problem, however, is that most standardized tests of this type discriminate against non-white, non-male test takers (at least in the United States). The SAT consistently underpredicts how women and non-whites will perform in college.

acknowledgment of the bias inherent in 'IQ' tests

There are two kinds of structured interviews: behavioral and situational. Behavioral interviews ask candidates to describe prior achievements and match those to what is required in the current job (i.e., “Tell me about a time…?”). Situational interviews present a job-related hypothetical situation (i.e., “What would you do if…?”). A diligent interviewer will probe deeply to assess the veracity and thought process behind the stories told by the candidate. Structured interviews are predictive even for jobs that are themselves unstructured. We’ve also found that they cause both candidates and interviewers to have a better experience and are perceived to be most fair.

To help interviewers, we’ve developed an internal tool called qDroid, where an interviewer picks the job they are screening for, checks the attributes they want to test, and is emailed an interview guide with questions designed to predict performance for that job. This makes it easy for interviewers to find and ask great interview questions. Interviewers can also share the document with others on the interview panel so everyone can collaborate to assess the candidate from all perspectives.

great idea, & provides interviewees w/ a more standardized experience

We have a strong bias against leaders who champion themselves: people who use “I” far more than “we” and focus exclusively on what they accomplished, rather than how.

the question of whether having up to twenty-five interviews per candidate was actually helpful or not. He found that four interviews were enough to predict whether or not we should hire someone with 86 percent confidence. Every additional interviewer after the fourth added only 1 percent more predictive power. It simply wasn’t worth the extra time for Google or the suffering for the candidate, so we implemented a “Rule of Four,” limiting the number of interviews a candidate could have on-site (though we allowed exceptions in certain cases). That change alone shaved our median time to hire to 47 days, compared to 90 to 180 days in the past, and has saved employees hundreds of thousands of hours.

very interesting stat

In 2010, we ran 300,000 rejected software engineer resumes through this system, revisited 10,000 applications, and hired 150 people. This may seem like a lot of work to get 150 hires, but a yield of 1.5 percent is six times better than our overall hiring yield of 0.25 percent. We don’t just look at the candidate side of hiring. Interviewers also receive feedback on their own personal ability to predict whether someone should be hired. Every interviewer sees a record of the interview scores they have given in the past and whether those people were hired or not.

Once you see the company’s goals, it’s easy enough to compare them to your own. If they’re wildly out of step, either there’s a good reason or you refocus. In addition, everyone’s OKRs are visible to everyone else in the company on our internal website, right next to their phone number and office location.

love this idea

At YouTube they tried sorting everyone into a rank order of most to least effective, regardless of level, and found that one of the two most effective people was a mid-level employee, who was then rewarded with one of the biggest stock grants at YouTube.

One leader, who had been cautious about wading into issues outside his area of expertise, was told, “Every time you open your mouth you add value.” For years after, he told me, that one bit of insight from a colleague encouraged him to be a much more active member of his team. He’d been coached to speak up more by his boss, but it meant more coming from a peer.

importance of direct peer feedback

I once had to terminate someone who worked for me, who upon exiting told me, “I’d never be able to do your job.” I said, “You can, but at a place where the demands are different.” Three years later, he called me to share that he’d been promoted to chief human resources officer of a Fortune 500 company, and was thriving. He said the pace was a bit slower than Google, but it fit him perfectly. And he’d been able to become a trusted counselor to the CEO precisely because of his measured, thoughtful style.

the top tail, the very best performers, experience a company differently than average or mediocre performers do. Our data show us that they find it easier to get things done, feel more valued, feel that their work is more meaningful, and leave the company at one-fifth the rate that our lowest performers do. Why? Because top performers live in a virtuous cycle of great output, great feedback, more great output, and more great feedback. They get so much love on a daily basis that the extra programs you might offer can’t actually make them much happier.

Teams working for the best managers also performed better and had lower turnover. In fact, manager quality was the single best predictor of whether employees would stay or leave, supporting the adage that people don’t quit companies, they quit bad managers.