Despite Google’s continued growth and profitability, by the mid–2000s there were signs that something was wrong with the way it was selecting talent. Many of its hires were not performing the way management had imagined, and there was a growing sense within Google that company recruiters and managers were ignoring many candidates whose talent was not getting captured by the familiar metrics used by most companies, such as grades, test scores, and diplomas.11 As Todd Carlisle, the human resources director for product quality operations at Google, explained to me, “We began to spend a lot of
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