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

by Laszlo Bock

“Only hire people who are better than you.”

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

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. I should disclose up front that newly hired managers at Google hate this! Managers want to pick their own teams. But even the best-intentioned managers compromise their standards as searches drag on. In most companies, for example, they set very high bars for the quality of administrative assistants they want on the first day of a search, but by day ninety most managers will take anyone who will answer a phone. Even worse, individual managers can be biased: They want to hire a friend or take on an intern as a favor to an executive or a big client. Finally, letting managers make hiring decisions gives them too much power over the people on their teams.

“The broader failing of McKinsey and its acolytes at Enron is their assumption that an organization’s intelligence is simply a function of the intelligence of its employees. They believe in stars, because they don’t believe in systems.” 76 While that didn’t quite square with my own experience of McKinsey, which had a robust set of internal systems for people development and counseled clients to have the same, 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.

The lesson of “The Talent Myth” was not “Don’t hire smart people.” It was “Don’t hire exclusively for smarts.” Sound advice. 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.

4 ................ Searching for the Best The evolution of Google’s “self-replicating talent machine”

As we wrapped up a Google board meeting, Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel and a board member, concluded: “What’s most impressive is that your team has built the world’s first self-replicating talent machine. You’ve created a system that not only hires remarkable people, but also scales with the company and gets better with every generation.”

In fact, 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. As a point of comparison, Harvard University in 2012 extended offers to 6.1 percent of its applicants (2,076 admitted out of 34,303 applicants). It’s a very hard place to get into, but almost twenty-five times easier than getting hired by Google.

It really did start with the founders

Today we split that responsibility across two teams of senior leaders, one for product-management and engineering roles and another for sales, finance, and all other roles. And we have one final reviewer of every—yes, every—candidate: our CEO, Larry Page.

The early days: hiring astounding people at a snail’s pace

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

Needles in a very big haystack: finding the best candidates among the seven billion people out there

fluke.

fluke

A referral bonus is an extrinsic motivator, meaning that it is motivation that comes from outside yourself.

What we learned is that Googlers were making referrals for intrinsic reasons. We could have offered $10,000 for each referral and it likely wouldn’t have made a difference.

We were just doing a really poor job of managing our referrals.

Oops—our employees don’t know everyone in the world

nudge

donner un coup de coude

Along the way, we noticed something startling. The very best people aren’t out there looking for work.

Even information that an individual may have put on the Internet and then deleted can sometimes still be found. The Wayback Machine, a service of the Internet Archive, regularly makes backups of more than 240 billion Web pages and has searchable records going back to 1996.

The first step to building a recruiting machine is to turn every employee into a recruiter by soliciting referrals.

As your organization grows, the second step is to ask your best-networked people to spend even more time sourcing great hires.

Finally, be willing to experiment. We learned billboards don’t work because we tried one. Our experience in Aarhus taught us that sometimes it makes more sense to hire a team on their terms than on your own.

5 ................ Don’t Trust Your Gut Why our instincts keep us from being good interviewers, and what you can do to hire better

A century of science points the way to an answer

The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent).

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.

The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent).

The goal of our interview process is to predict how candidates will perform once they join the team. We achieve that goal by doing what the science says: combining behavioral and situational structured interviews with assessments of cognitive ability, conscientiousness, and leadership.xxvi

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.

Now you know how to ask interview questions. How do you pick which ones to ask?

In addition to testing technical hires on their engineering ability, we realized that there were 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 adapt to new situations. Remember that this is about understanding how candidates have solved hard problems in real life and how they learn, not checking GPAs and SATs. Leadership. Also not surprising, right? Every company wants leaders. But Google looks for a particular type of leadership, called “emergent leadership.” This is a form of leadership that ignores formal designations—at Google there is rarely a formal leader of any effort. I recall being asked what it meant that I was the “executive sponsor” for a project that culminated in 10 percent salary increases for everyone in the company. I explained that not only did I not know, but that within Google it was a meaningless designation. In all likelihood, a relatively new hire had put those words next to my name because my title was Senior Vice President, but my role on the project was the same as anyone else’s: Provide an opinion, do some analysis, and help get the right outcome. At Google we expect that 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 ...

Constantly check that your hiring process actually works

Every additional interviewer after the fourth added only 1 percent more predictive power. It simply wasn’t worth the extra time for Google or the suffering for the candidate, so we implemented a “Rule of Four,” limiting the number of interviews a candidate could have on-site

Never compromise on quality

Putting it all together: how to hire the best

In 2013, with roughly forty thousand people, the average Googler spent one and a half hours per week on hiring, even though our volume of hiring is almost twice what it was when we had twenty thousand people. We’ve reduced the amount of time spent by Googlers on each hire by about 75 percent. We continue to work to reduce this, and to become more efficient in managing our staffing teams and their time. But by far the best recruiting technique is having a core of remarkable people. Jonathan Rosenberg used to keep a stack of two hundred Googler resumes in his office. If a candidate was on the fence about joining Google, Jonathan would simply give them the stack and say: “You get to work with these people.”

So how do you create your own self-replicating staffing machine?

Set a high bar for quality.

Find your own candidates.

Assess candidates objectively.

Give candidates a reason to join. Make clear why the work you are doing matters, and let the candidate experience the astounding people they will get to work with.

If you’re committed to transforming your team or your organization, hiring better is the single best way to do it.

And it was thanks to Loren, who had been a Googler for five days and whom we trusted to make this encounter possible. 6 ................ Let the Inmates Run the Asylum Take power from your managers and trust your people to run things

At Google, we have always had a deep skepticism about management. This is just how many engineers think: Managers are a Dilbertian layer that at best protects the people doing the actual work from the even more poorly informed people higher up the org chart.

It turns out that we are not skeptical about managers per se. Rather, we are profoundly suspicious of power, and the way managers historically have abused it. A traditional manager controls your pay, your promotions, your workload, your coming and going, whether you have a job or not, and these days even reaches into your evenings and weekends. While a manager doesn’t necessarily abuse any of these sources of power, the potential for abuse exists. Our anxieties about toxic bosses show up everywhere in the culture, from Michael Scott on The Office to the recent flood of books like The No A**hole Rule and A**holes Finish First (the first teaches how to survive working with jerks and the latter how to be one).xxxiii

Acton isn’t just making some academic observation that power corrupts. He’s shouting that those in authority must be held to even higher standards than the rest.

Managers aren’t bad people. But each of us is susceptible to the conveniences and small thrills of power.

wager

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