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

by Laszlo Bock

“emergent lead...

This is a form of leadership that ignores formal...

at Google there is rarely a formal leader...

my role on the project was the same as anyone else’s: Provide an opinion, do some analysis, and help get the right outcome.

over a team’s life, different skills will be needed at different times, so various people will need to step into leadership roles, contribute, and—just as important—recede back into the team once the need for their specific skills has passed.

We have a strong bias against leaders who cham...

“Googleyness.”

This isn’t a neatly defined box, but includes attributes like

enjoyi...

intellectual ...

conscienti...

comfort with a...

evidence that you’ve taken some courageous or interesting paths in your life.

Role-Related Knowledge.

By far the least important attribute we screen for is whether someone actually knows anything abou...

our experience is that curious people who are open to learning will figure out the right answers in almost all cases, and have a much greater chance of creating a truly novel solution.

we have moved from a philosophy of hiring exclusively generalists to a more refined approach, where we look across our portfolio of talent and ensure we have the right balance of generalists and experts.

Once we identified these attributes, we began requiring all interview feedback to comment specifically on each one.

Not every interviewer had to assess every attribute, but at least two independent interviewers had to assess each attribute. In addition, we required that the written feedback include the attribute being assessed, the question asked, the candidate’s answer, and the interviewer’s assessment of that answer.

This format would prove to be very valuable because it allowed subsequent reviewers of each candidate to inde...

In other words, if you interviewed me and weren’t impressed, but had written down your question and my answer, a later reviewer could make their own assessme...

Not only does that allow us to give candidates a second chance of sorts, but it also helps us assess whether the interviewer herself is good at assessing people.

As you can tell, we invest a lot in hiring great people.

But our operating assumption is that anything we’re doing, we can do better.

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.

we implem...

“Rule of ...

limiting the number of interviews a candidate co...

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.

Interviewers also receive feedback on their own personal ability to predict whether...

Every interviewer sees a record of the interview scores they have given in the past and whether th...

There are six unique parts of our screening process, with a goal of ensuring that the bar for quality is never compromised and that our decisions are as free of bias as possible.

First, assessment is led by Google’s dedicated recruiters rather than line managers.

Our recruiters are experts in interpreting resumes,

Our professional recruiters are also familiar with many jobs across Google,

no small feat considering our business currently includes search, self-driving cars, futuristic glasses, fiber-based Internet services, manufacturing, video studios, and venture capital!

Our recruiters are able to route candidates across the entire company, which requires both visibility into all the jobs and an understanding of what they are.

After the resume is screened and selected, the second part of our process is a remote interview.

These are much harder to conduct than in-person interviews because it’s difficult to build rapport and pick up on nonverbal cues. Phone interviews are particularly challenging for people who are not fluent in English

Having professionals do the initial remote evaluation also means that it’s possible to do a robust, reliable screening for the most important hiring attributes up front.

Often a candidate’s problem-solving and learning ability is assessed at this stage.

We do this early so that later interviewers can focus on other attributes, like leadership ...

The third key difference in our approach, therefore, is to have a subordinate interview a prospective hire.

It sends a strong signal to candidates about Google being nonhierarchical, and it also helps prevent cronyism, where managers hire their old buddies for their new teams.

Fourth, we add a “cross-functional interviewer,” someone with little or no connection at all to the group for which the candidate is interviewing.

This is to provide a disinterested assessment:

has a strong interest in keeping the quality of hiring high.

Fifth, we compile feedback about candidates in a radically unusual way.