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

by Laszlo Bock

These small moments of observation that are then used to make bigger decisions are called

“thin slices.”

judgments made in the first ten seconds of an interview could predict the outcome of the interview.

The problem is, these predictions from the first ten seconds are useless. They create a situation where an interview is spent trying to confirm what we think of someone, rather than truly assessing them.

Psychologists call this

confirmatio...

“the tendency to search for, interpret, or prioritize information in a way that confirms on...

Based on the slightest interaction, we make a snap, unconscious judgment heavily influenced by our existing biases and beliefs. Without realizing it, we then shift from assessing a candidate to hunt...

most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds.

Equally worthless are the case interviews and brainteasers used by many firms.

typical, unstructured job interviews were pretty bad at predicting how someone would perform once hired.

Unstructured interviews have an r2 of 0.14, meaning that they can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance.xxiii This is somewhat ahead of reference checks (explaining 7 percent of performance), ahead of the number of years of work experience (3 percent),

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. Even this can’t predict performance perfectly, since actual performance also depends on other skills, such as how well you collaborate with others, adapt to uncertainty, and learn. And worse, many jobs don’t have nice, neat pieces of work that you can hand to a candidate.

for many jobs there are too many variables involved day-to-day to allow the construction of a representative work sample.

All our technical hires, whether in engineering or product management, go through a work sample test of sorts, where they are asked to solve engineering problems during the interview.

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,

They are predictive because general cognitive ability includes the capacity to learn, and the combination of raw intelligence and learning ability will...

The problem, however, is that most standardized tests of this type discriminate against non-...

Tied with tests of general cognitive ability are structured interviews (26 percent), where candidates are asked a consistent set of questions with clear criteria to assess the quality of responses.

The idea is that any variation in candidate assessment is a result of the candidate’s performance, not because an interviewer has higher or lower standards, or asks easier or harder questions.

There are two kinds of structured interviews: behaviora...

Behavioral interviews ask candidates to describe prior achievements and match those to what is...

Structured interviews are predictive even for jobs that are themselves unstructured.

So why don’t more companies use them? Well, they are hard to develop: You have to write them, test them, and make sure interviewers stick to them. And then you have to continuously refresh them so candidates don’t compare notes and come prepared with all the answers.

It’s a lot of work, but the alternative is to waste everyone’s time with a typical interview that is either highly subjective, or discriminatory, or both.

There is a better way. Research shows that combinations of assessment techniques are better...

Yes, these questions are bland; it’s the answers that are compelling.

But the questions give you a consistent, reliable basis for sifting the superb candidates from the merely great,

because superb candidates will have much, much better examples and reasons for making the choices they did. You’ll see a clear li...

the point is to identify the best person for the job, not to indulge yourself by asking questions that trigger your biases

We then score the interview with a consistent rubric.

For each component, the interviewer has to indicate how the candidate did, and each performance level is clearly defined.

The interviewer then has to write exactly how the candidate demonstrated their general cognitive ability, so later reviewers can make their own assessment.

think about the last five people you interviewed for a similar job.

Did you give them similar questions or did each person get different questions? Did you cover everything you needed to with each of them, or did you run out of time? Did you hold them to exactly the same standard, or were you tougher on one because you were tired, cranky, and having a bad day? Did you write up detailed notes so that other interviewers could benefit from your insights?

A concise hiring rubric addresses all these issues because it distills messy, vague, and complicated work situations down...

Applying a boring-seeming rubric is the key to quantifying and taming the mess.

If you don’t want to build all this yourself, it’s easy enough to find online examples of structured interview questions that you can adapt and use in your environments.

Remember too that you don’t just want to assess the candidate.

You want them to fall in love with you. Really. You want them to have a great experience, have their concerns addressed, and come away feeling like they just had the best day of their lives.

It’s always worth investing time to make sure they feel good at the end of it, because they will tell other people about their experience—and because it’s the right way to treat people.

It’s too easy in an interview to focus on your needs: You’re busy and need to assess this person as fast as you can.

But they’re making a bigger decision ...

four distinct attributes that predicted whether someone would be successful at Google:

General Cognitive Ability.

Not surprisingly, we want smart people who can learn and adap...

Leadership.

Google looks for a particular type of leadership, called