Google has spent years analyzing who succeeds at the company, which has moved away

from a focus on GPAs, brand name schools, and interview brain teasers.

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In a conversation with The New York Times Tom Friedman, Googles head of people
operations, Laszlo Bock, detailed what the company looks for. And increasingly, its not
about credentials.

Graduates of top schools can lack intellectual humility

Megan McArdle argued recently that writers procrastinate because they got too many
As in English class. Successful young graduates have been taught to rely on talent,
which makes them unable to fail gracefully.
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Google looks for the ability to step back and embrace other peoples ideas when theyre
better. Its intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn, Bock says.
Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they dont learn how to learn
from that failure.

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Those people have an unfortunate reaction, Bock says:

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They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good
happens, its because Im a genius. If something bad happens, its because someones an
idiot or I didnt get the resources or the market moved. What weve seen is that the
people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce
position. Theyll argue like hell. Theyll be zealots about their point of view. But then you
say, heres a new fact, and theyll go, Oh, well, that changes things; youre right.
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People that make it without college are often the most

exceptional
Talent exists in so many places that hiring managers who rely on a few schools are using
it as a crutch and missing out. Bock says:

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When you look at people who dont go to school and make their way in the world, those
are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those
people.
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Many schools dont deliver on what they promise, Bock says, but generate a ton of debt
in return for not learning whats most useful. Its an extended adolescence, he says.
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Learning ability is more important than IQ

Succeeding in academia isnt always a sign of being able to do a job. Bock has previously
said that college can be an artificial environment that conditions for one type of
thinking. IQ is less valuable than learning on the fly, Bock says:

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For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and its
not IQ. Its learning ability. Its the ability to process on the fly. Its the ability to pull
together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral
interviews that we validate to make sure theyre predictive.

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A behavioral interview, in contrast with those that ask people to figure out how many
tennis balls fit into a tennis court, might ask how youve reacted to a particularly difficult
problem in the past. They can also help find people who fit the companys definition of
leadership. Its not about leading a club at school or an impressive prior title, Bock says,
but the ability to step up and lead when its necessary.

You can stop counting how many golfballs will fit in a schoolbus now.
Google has admitted that the headscratching questions it once used to quiz job
applicants (How many piano tuners are there in the entire world? Why are manhole
covers round?) were utterly useless as a predictor of who will be a good employee.

We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time, Laszlo Bock, senior vice
president of people operations at Google, told the New York Times. They dont predict
anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.
A list of Google questions compiled by Seattle job coach Lewis Lin, and then read by
approximately everyone on the entire Internet in one form or another, included these
humdingers:

How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco

How many times a day does a clocks hands overlap?

A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so
as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass
blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

Bock says Google now relies on more quotidian means of interviewing prospective
employees, such as standardizing interviews so that candidates can be assessed
consistently, and behavioral interviewing, such as asking people to describe a time
they solved a difficult problem. Its also giving much less weight to college grade point
averages and SAT scores.

With thousands of job applications pouring in everyday, it's no wonder Google has hiring down to
a science. True to form, the search giant has scoured its data over the years in hopes of determining
what attributes successful employees share and which hiring strategies actually expose those
attributes. In a new interview with The New York Times, Google's senior vice president of people
operations, Laszlo Bock, shared what he's learned from this research about how to hire effectively.
Here are some highlights:
1. Brainteasers are useless.
For years, Google's most famous and feared hiring strategy was asking applicants questions that
were seemingly impossible to answer, like, "How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane," and
"How many gas stations are in Manhattan?" In theory, they were intended to measure potential
hires' ability to think analytically. But in practice, Bock tells the Times, "They don't predict
anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart."
2. No one is good at hiring.
Several years ago, Bock explained, Google looked over tens of thousands of job interviews,
reviewed the scores each candidate received, and assessed their subsequent performance. They
wanted to determine if there was such a good thing as a good hirer. There wasn't. "We found zero
relationship," he said. "It's a complete random mess." Now, Google uses a consistent rubric to
assess candidates, Bock says, "rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up."
3. In leaders, the most important quality is consistency.
The toughest jobs to hire for, according to Bock, are leadership positions, because the
characteristics they look for are "more amorphous and ambiguous" than the qualities they look for
in, say, a programmer. But among these intangible qualities, Bock said, the most critical is
consistency. "If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom,
because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want," he said.
"If your manager is all over the place, you're never going to know what you can do, and you're
going to experience it as very restrictive."
4. Employees score their managers.
In most companies, employee reviews are totally lopsided. Managers get to review their staff, but
the reverse is rarely true. At Google, though, employees get two opportunities a year to fill out
what Bock calls an "upward feedback survey" about their managers. The survey measures things
like whether a manager treats the team with respect and outlines goals clearly. Google collects the
data on each manager and shares it with the manager directly. "We've actually made it harder to be
a bad manager. If you go back to somebody and say, 'Look, you're an eighth-percentile people
manager at Google. This is what people say.' They might say, 'Well, you know, I'm actually better

than that.' And then I'll say, 'That's how you feel. But these are the facts that people are reporting
about how they experience you," Bock says.
5. GPAs and test scores don't matter.
In the past, Google was known for asking potential hires for a copy of their college transcripts and
test scores. They've since given up on that strategy, because, Bock says, "After two or three years,
your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in
school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You're also fundamentally a
different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently."