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

by Laszlo Bock

My personal and professional experience is that if you give people freedom, they will surprise, delight, and amaze you.

They will also sometimes disappoint you, but if we were perfect w...

Buying companies and then shutting down their products is a recent Silicon Valley phenomenon, awkwardly known as

acqui-hiring.

The ostensible purpose is to obtain people who have demonstrated their capabilities by building great products and who otherw...

It’s not clear yet whether acqui-hiring is a good way to build succ...

First, it’s fabulously ...

Acqui-hires also see their products killed. That’s a painful experience.

While the money is supposed to make up for it, I’ve heard about many acqui-hired engineers across Silicon Valley who are just biding their time until they are fully vested and then plan to strike out on their own again. It’s also not clear that acqui-hired employees generate better outcomes than hired employees.

Given that over two-thirds of mergers and acquisitions fail to create value when the products and businesses are kept alive,69 there would have to be something special about a...

Buying the best seems like the way to go if you’re building a baseball team, but it’s much trickier if you’re building a company. The labor market for employees isn’t as transparent as the market for baseball players.

What executives will tell you is that they recruit the best people and then groom, train, and coach them into champions.

There are three reasons to be skeptical of these claims.

First, if they were really doing this, wouldn’t more organizations have cham...

Second, if they were really better at recruiting, shouldn’t there be something special about how they recruit?

Yet most organizations run recruiting the same way: Post a job, screen resumes, interview some people, pick whom to hire. Nothing more complicated than that.

Third, most people simply aren’t very good at interviewing.

There’s ample data showing that most assessment occurs in the first three to five minutes of an interview (or even more quickly),

with the remaining time being spent confirming that bias;

that interviewers are subconsciously biased toward people like themselves; and that most intervi...

In addition to thinking we’re superior interviewers, we convince ourselves that the candidate we select is also above average. After all, we wouldn’t offer them a job otherwise.

We forget our conviction that just about every hire was going to be a star.

Can’t you compensate by training people to be great?

Not so much. Designing effective training is hard. Really hard.

Some experts go so far as to say that 90 percent of training doesn’t cause a sustained improvement in performance or change in behavior because it’s neither well designed nor well delivered.

It’s almost impossibly difficult to take an average performer and through training tu...

So we’re left with two paths to assembling phenomenal talent. You can find a way to hire the very best, or you can hire average performers and try to turn them into the best.

Put bluntly, which of the following situations would you rather be in?

We hire 90th percentile performers, who start doing great work right away. We hire average performers, and through our training programs hope eventually to...

Doesn’t seem like a hard choice when it’s...

Companies continue to invest substantially more in training than in hiring,

The presence of a huge training budget is not evidence that you’re investing in your people.

It’s evidence that you failed to hire the right people to begin with.

At Google, we front-load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires.

We spend more than twice as much on recruiting, as a percentage of our people budget, as an average company.

If we are better able to select people up front, that means we have less work to do with...

Our greatest single constraint on growth has always, always been our ability to find great people.

For many years, we didn’t have the huge advantage that the Yankees did: money.

Simply buying the best wasn’t an option for Google in its formative years, just as it isn’t an op...

Sifting the exceptional from the rest required radically rethinking hiring,

you do have to make two big changes to how you think about hiring.

The first change is to hire more slowly.

in fact the top performers in most industries aren’t actually looking for work, precisely because they are top performers who are enjoying their success right where they are.

it’s worth the wait

“A top-notch engineer is worth three hundred times or more than an average engineer.… I’d rather lose an entire incoming class of engineering graduates than one exceptional technologist.”

Google doesn’t arbitrarily decide in what order ads are presented. Rather, our advertisers bid for the position they want in the list of ads, which can cost from less than a penny to more than $10 per word.

These insights translated directly into billions of dollars of value for our shareholders, hundreds of billions of dollars in new business for our advertisers, and happier users who could now find exactly what they wanted across the entire Web.

the second big change to make in how you hire—is: “Only hire people who are better than you.”

Every person I’ve hired is better than me in some meaningful way.

It takes longer to find these exceptional people, but it’s always worth the wait.