It isn't just the art department.
"Love will find that destiny has a price." Can someone interpret that sentence for me, please?
That Google article is interesting, but they are working backwards. Just because successful people in your organization have certain traits, it doesn't necessarily follow that those who do not have those traits will not succeed. In fact they run the risk of self-replicating and getting into a groupthink problem by hiring too many of the same types of people according to their algorithm. It's almost like that guy, Mr. Bock, has no idea what he's doing really; introversion and extroversion have very little to do with job performance. The main predictor of job performance, as far as the Big Five personality traits go, is Conscientiousness.
It would be easier for them to simply ask their employees to recommend people they know. Birds of a feather flock together.
An interview at Google sounds like sheer torture--as does the entire application process.
The Google process, at least as explained, seems to me to disempower line management. The best person to decide on the characteristics for inside salespeople, for example, is the Director of Inside Sales--he is the one who will be accountable for results, and he knows the details of the work. HR should be there to help, but the line manager should be the decision maker.
There are practical, ethical, and perhaps legal issues with employee screening based on correlations without a solid theory of causality. It may well be, for example, that dog lovers make the best programmers. But there will still be some cat people who would have done a great job if the process hadn't screened them out. Would a process like this really pass the EEO test of job relevance? What if the dog lovers were mainly male an the cat lovers were mainly female?
Ultimately, getting and keeping the best people is a function of incentives. Microsoft was able to do it with stock options, until the company's share price peaked. It sounds like Google is focusing on fluff and paying inadequate attention to more-important variables. So far they are doing OK, since they are the leading tech company and are doing interesting work, and a lot of their employees became rich on the initial stock runup. But in the long run I think they will have a difficult time attracting top talent if their share price doesn't resume its upward trend. Also, they seem to have an institutional problem with hubris, and it doesn't look like they are addressing it. Indeed they may be encouraging it by encouraging employees to think of themselves as superior people who are not subject to normal constraints.
The Google process, at least as explained, seems to me to disempower line management.
I imagine the HR people find all the eligible dog owners or whatever and the individual managers pick from that set.
Yeah, but it sounds like there is a set of generic screening criteria which are developed with little or no line manager input.
Maybe they do have input. If, as Holmes suggests, there's a certain amount of groupthink involved then line managers probably suffer from it, too.
I wonder if Google can Google this comment thread.
Commenting by HaloScan
