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

by Laszlo Bock

the combination of our stringent hiring bar and exhaustive focus on recruiting meant we were successfully hiring remarkable people.

In fact, sixteen years later, about one-third of the original hundred hires are still at Google.

It’s rare among start-ups for early hires to persist this long, and even rarer for them to be able to continue growing personally and professionally as the company scales from tens of people to tens of thousands.

One of the main reasons we focus so much on growing the company is to have enough g...

in the future they could each be running a business as big as Google is today, while still being part of the company.

So the hiring system was functional, but it was a far cry from being a self-replicating talent machine.

Even Googlers complained about how long and arbitrary the hiring process seemed, even though they all agreed that it did result in remarkable hiring quality.

It was obvious that we had a problem.

Put another way, it would take 125 people working full-time to hire 1,000 people.

Our hiring process was simply too resource intensive, too time consuming, and too painful for candidates.

It turned out that nobody was meaningfully motivated by the referral bonus.

If people were making referrals for intrinsic reasons, why did the referral rate slow down? Were people having less fun at Google? Were we straying from our mission?

No. We were just doing a really poor job of managing our referrals.

we still hired far less than 5 percent of the people who were referred to us. This was frustrating for Googlers. Why keep referring good people if less than one in twenty actually got hired?

And even worse, candidates were suffering through far too many interviews, and referrers weren’t being kept in the loop about what was happening to their friends.

To address these issues, we drastically reduced the number of interviews each candidate went through. We also developed a...

where referred candidates get a call within forty-eight hours and the referring Googler is provided weekly updates o...

Googlers and candidates were happier with the process, but the number of referred ...

Our overreliance on referrals had simply started to exhaust Googlers’ networks.

Aided recall

is a marketing research technique where subjects are shown an ad or told the name of a product and asked if th...

In the context of generating referrals, people tend to have a few people who are top of mind. But they rarely do an exhaustive review of all the people they know

We increased the volume of referrals by more than one-third by jogging people’s memories just as marketers do.

Along the way, we noticed something startling.

The very best people aren’t out there looking for work.

Great-performing people are happy and being amply rewarded wh...

They don’t occur to people as referrals, because why would you bother referring someone who is...

And they certainly don’t appl...

So we rebuilt our staf...

Now they’ve become an in-house recruiting firm, with the goal of seeking out and cultivating the best people on the planet.

we’ve built and enhanced with a variety of tools for sifting through and tracking candidates, hundreds of brilliant recruiters find and cultivate these individuals over time—sometimes over years.

The result is that our in-house search firm finds more than half of our hires each year, at a cost far lower than using outside firms...

And each year, technology makes it easier to fi...

In fact, it is now possible to identify virtually every person working in a particular company or industry, and from there decide whom to recruit.

We call this a “Knowable Universe” exercise: systematically locating every person within a universe of job types, companies, or candidate profiles.

it’s straightforward to generate lists of hundreds or thousands of potential candidates.

Once we generate a list, we review portions of it with Googlers who have expertise in that area or may know those individuals. We spot-check online to see if there’s anything else to help us identify those who would be most successful at Google.

And then we reach out to network and build a relationship.

Corporate job sites are awful. They are difficult to search, filled with generic job descriptions that don’t tell you anything about what the job really is or what the team you’ll be part of is like, and provide no feedback on whether you’d be good for a role or not.

there’s more variance in quality within search firms than across search firms,

so selecting the individual search consultants you work with is more crucial than selecting the company.

The Google experience has been that job boards generate many, many applicants and vanishingly few actual hires.

A less motivated candidate will apply to lots of jobs and lots of companies through job boards, which make it easy to spam employers with applications.

Our hiring rates from job boards were so low that in 2012 we stopped posting on them entirely.

focusing on quality alone wasn’t enough. We also had to cast a wider, more diverse net. And we had to get faster.

The first step to building a recruiting machine is to turn every employee into a recruiter by soliciting referrals. But you need to temper the natural bias we all have toward our friends

the second step is to ask your best-networked people to spend even more tim...

Finally, be willing to e...

“the first five minutes” of an interview are what really matter,

interviewers make initial assessments and spend the rest of the interview working to confirm those assessments.