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

by Laszlo Bock

In addition to being willing to take longer, to wait for someone better than you, you also need managers to give up power when it comes to hiring.

Managers want to pick their...

But even the best-intentioned managers compromise their standards...

Even worse, individual managers can be biased:

Finally, letting managers make hiring decisions gives them too much power over the people on their teams.

After six months or so, our new managers see that the quality of people they are hiring is better than they have experienced anywhere in the past,

I wouldn’t say they come to love not making hiring decisions, but they appreciate it.

As we grew to need thousands of new employees each year,

we learned that many of the best people didn’t go to those schools.

still managing people issues based on our best instincts, which could be just as flawed as anyone else’s, instead of complementing them with data.

So we started seeking out candidates who had shown resilience and an ability to overcome hardship.

We now prefer to take a bright, hardworking student who graduated from the top of her class at a state school over an average or...

The pedigree of your college education matters far less than what y...

What matters is what you bring to the company and how you’ve dis...

some of our best performers never set foot on a college campus.

I agree that blindly hiring for brains and giving them unbounded freedom to do what they will is a recipe for sudden and catastrophic failure.

You obviously want to hire the best people, but “best” isn’t defined by a single attribute like intelligence or expertise.

being a star in one environment doesn’t make you a star in a new one. So making sure someone will thrive in yo...

among the most important of which are humility and conscientiousness.

Superb hiring isn’t just about recruiting the biggest name, top salesperson, or cleverest engineer.

It’s about finding the very best people who will be successful in the context of your organization, and who will make everyone around them more successful.

Hiring is the most important people function you have, and most of us aren’t as good at it as we think. Refocusing your resources on hiring better will have a higher return t...

we’ve grown by about five thousand people almost every year.

To get there, we start with the 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 people who apply for jobs each year, which means we hire about 0.25 percent of the people we consider.

I was sort of afraid of having Google with fifty engineers be less productive than Google with ten engineers.”

Each generation of hiring will therefore be a slightly poorer version of the hiring done by the prior generation.

As you get bigger, there will also be more temptation to hire a friend or customer’s child to help them out or build the relationship.

These are almost always a compromise of quality. The result is that you go from hiring stellar people as a small company or team to h...

we also built an applicant tracking system that would check a candidate’s resume against the resumes of existing Googlers. If there was overlap—say you went to the same school in the same years as a Googler, or worked at Microsoft at the same time—the Googler would often get an automated email asking if they knew you and what they thought of you.

The idea was that since references the candidate provides are almost always glowing, these “backdoor” references, we thought, would be more honest.

All this information and more would be assembled into a hiring packet of fifty pages or more per candidate and reviewed by a hiring committee. There were many hiring committees, and

each would be composed of people who were familiar with the job being filled but didn’t have a direct stake in it.

This was to ensure objectivity.

we wanted to hire “smart generalists” rather than experts.

The firms were mystified that we’d prefer hiring someone who was clever and curious over someone who actually knew what he was doing.

doing well in solo competitions doesn’t always translate into being a team player.

And while people who win these contests can be brilliant, it’s often only in one field.

Or they are accustomed to solving problems with finite ends and clear solutions, rather than navigating the comp...

That’s an issue at Google, where we look for people who can not only solve today’s problems, but can also solve whatever unknown problems may come up in the future.

Good section here on hiring and the learning process and evolution og Google's approach over time.

our analyses revealed that academic performance didn’t predict job performance beyond the first two or three years after college,

In the mid-2000s, interviewers could ask candidates any questions they wanted,

but they didn’t follow any particular structure, so their feedback often lacked insight. The absence of coordination across interviewers also meant we often forgot to ask about some specific attribute, so ...

This made for a miserable experience for m...

As you might imagine, the hiring machine moved glacially.

Being hired by Google could take six months or longer, and a candidate could endure fifteen or even twenty-five interviews before getting an offer.

But in retrospect, this was the right trade-off at the time. The hiring machine was overly conservative by design. It focused on avoiding false positives—the

the people who looked good in the interview process but actually would not perform well—because

because we would rather have missed hiring two great performers if it meant we would also...

A small company can’t afford to hire someone who turns out to be awful. Bad performers and political people have a toxic effect on an entire team and require substantial management time to coach or exit. Google was g...

So we kept roles open until we found exactly the ...