Google Adjusts Hiring Process As Needs Grow
Google Inc.'s recruiting process is legendary in Silicon Valley. Tales abound of job candidates who suffered through a dozen or more in-person interviews, and applicants with years of work experience who were spurned after disclosing they had so-so college grades.
Now Google is attempting to fine tune its approach toward hiring staff. In addition to making the experience less grueling for would-be employees, it hopes to do a better job of offering the right jobs to the right people as it continues its rapid expansion. (See related article.)
PODCAST
Google's Laszlo Bock discusses what the Internet giant is looking for in new hires and how it views grade-point averages.Google has long attributed much of its success to its ability to attract bright minds and to build a culture where those hires can excel. But in February 2005, Google co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged to analysts that the company's high bar for hiring was holding back its expansion.
This past March, the Mountain View, Calif., company brought in a new head of human resources, former General Electric Co. executive Laszlo Bock, who also worked at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Under Mr. Bock, Google launched a large-scale survey of current employees, seeking to identify the factors that correlate with success at the company. "Everything works if you're trying to hire 500 people a year or 1,000," says Mr. Bock, 33 years old. But "we're hiring much larger numbers than that, and so it forces us to go back and say...what do we need to change in the way we interface with our candidates?"
One initiative Google has already undertaken is reducing the number of interviews. Mr. Bock says each candidate offered a job by Google went through 5.1 in-person interviews on average in June, down from 6.2 at the beginning of the year. (A veteran tech recruiter says five to eight interviews is probably about average for Silicon Valley.) Google is also considering requiring staff members who interview candidates to submit their assessments within a week of the interview; right now, there's no strict deadline.
QUESTION OF THE DAY
? Which company would you most want to work for?
The recruiting fine-tuning is a further sign that Google's in-house processes are in transition from those of a start-up to those of a big business. The eight-year-old company had 9,378 employees at the end of the third quarter, and analysts project that its revenue will top $10 billion this year. During the quarter, the company brought in an average of 16 new employees daily, up from 13 the quarter before. Its breakneck hiring has boosted staff from 1,628 at the end of 2003 to 3,021 a year later and 5,680 at the end of 2005.
In Google's early years, Mr. Brin or co-founder Larry Page interviewed nearly all job candidates before they were officially hired. A former Google executive recounts how, on occasion, Mr. Brin would show up for candidates' job interviews in unconventional dress, from roller blades to a cow costume complete with rubber udders around Halloween. Even today, at least one of the co-founders reviews every job offer recommended by an internal hiring committee on a weekly basis, sometimes pushing back with questions about an individual's qualifications.
People close to the company say it has traditionally focused a lot on candidates' academic performance and favored those who went to elite schools. Mr. Bock says that college grade-point average is a factor, and that most hires have done well academically. But he says there's no formal GPA requirement, and he points to new staff members who don't have college degrees but do have solid professional track records.
Recent candidates say the process can still drag on. "The process from a candidate's perspective is glacial," says one who was interviewed for a senior nonengineering position this year. After each of two in-person interviews, the candidate went more than a month without hearing from Google and finally accepted a job offer from another company.
Daniel Bernstein, 24 years old, recently interviewed for a corporate communications job at Google. After initial contact in May and two phone interviews, he was invited to headquarters, where he had separate interviews with about half-a-dozen people, was treated to lunch in the cafeteria and was handed a goodie bag with a Google T-shirt, notebook and pen. He also turned in several "homework" assignments, including a personal statement and a marketing plan for a future Google product.
In August, Google called Mr. Bernstein back for a second round, which he says would have entailed four or five more interviews. In the meantime, though, he had decided he wanted to work at a start-up, and he had already accepted a job offer at Meebo Inc., a Web-based instant-messaging provider.
Mr. Bock declines to comment on specific cases, but he says Google tries "to strike the right balance between letting candidates get to know Google, letting us get to know them, and moving quickly." He adds that the average time it takes Google to make an offer has dropped significantly over the last few months and that the "ideal would be that for at least some roles, we can make offers the same day people interview."
In the survey Google conducted in June, current employees were questioned on about 300 variables, including their performance on standardized tests, the age at which they first used a computer, how many foreign languages they spoke, how many patents they had and whether they had ever been published. Mr. Bock's team mapped the answers against 30 or 40 job-performance factors for each survey-taker, identifying clusters of variables that Google might focus on more during the hiring process.
The approach isn't without risk. "To do that carefully is really hard, and you could wind up with measures that are spurious" or make hiring worse, says Peter Cappelli, a management professor and director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania' s Wharton School.
So far, Google is experimenting with changes, such as additional short questionnaires for applicants and different interview formats. The company is also considering trying out an abbreviated hiring process, which would allow it to make an offer to some candidates after just two interviews.
Google is also moving from a format in which interviewers provided candidate feedback using free-form text and could give only one overall score to a format in which they offer targeted feedback grouped around four attributes (Google declines to name them) and multiple scores rating a candidate's knowledge, skills and abilities.
For the short questionnaires, Google has identified useful queries about a candidate's past, personality variables and workstyle preferences. Examples include: Have you ever turned a profit at your own nontech side business (dog walker, catering, tutoring, etc.)? How strongly would you describe yourself as someone with an assertive personality? At work would you prefer to manage others or do the work yourself?
But there's bad news for some job candidates, too. In July, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told analysts the company was "able to now in fact increase the standards by which we select and hire new people." While Mr. Bock says it's hard to say specifically how Google has raised the bar, he adds that his own team is looking for people for human-resources jobs who "can be promoted four, five, six times" and that other departments also hire people who are overqualified for the specific position they're recruited for. Mr. Bock says that the company's brisk growth means that the scope of any position generally expands rapidly.
谷歌招兵买马 力争人尽其才
谷歌(Google Inc.)的招聘程序在美国硅谷尽人皆知。有关应聘者熬过十几轮面试的轶闻，以及一些有多年工作经验的求职者因大学成绩平平而被该公司弃用的传闻不 枚举。
谷歌目前正试图对它的员工招聘方式进行微调。除了减轻招聘过程的痛苦程度外，该公司还希望能在企业规模的迅速扩张中更好地做到人尽其才。
谷歌一直将其成功主要归因于它有能力吸引来优秀的人才并创建一个员工能发挥其聪明才智的企业文化。但该公司的共同创始人谢尔盖?布林(Sergey Brin)却在2005年2月向分析师们承认，谷歌在人员招聘方面的高门槛正在阻碍该公司的业务扩张。
今年3月，谷歌聘请通用电气公司(General Electric Co.)的前管理人士拉兹洛?伯克(Laszlo Bock)出任公司的人力资源部负责人，伯克还曾在咨询企业麦肯锡公司(McKinsey & Co.)工作过。在伯克的领导下，谷歌对公司现有员工进行了一次大规模调查，以期找出与该公司获得成功有关的各种因素。现年33岁的伯克说：“如果你每年只需招募500或1,000人，用什么方式都行。”但“我们需要招聘的人数比那要多得多，因此我们不得不反躬自问……我们在与应聘者打交道时需作出何种改变？”
谷歌已经采取的一项改革措施就是减少面试次数。伯克说，每位被谷歌雇佣的员工平均接受的面试次数已从年初时的6.2次下降到6月份时的5.1次。(据一位科技行业的资深招聘人士说，硅谷受聘人员的平均面试次数为5到8次。)谷歌还在考虑要求公司的面试考官在面试结束一周内提交他们的评估报告；而该公司目前没有规定严格的评估期限。
对招聘程序的微调进一步表明，谷歌的内部工作流程正在从初创企业型向大企业的典型模式转变。截至今年第三季度末，这家成立时间只有8年的公司共有员工9,378人，而分析师预计该公司今年的收入将突破100亿美元。第三季度，该公司平均每天新吸纳16名员工，高于第二季度时的13名。这种令人眩目的招聘速度已使谷歌的员工总数从2003年末的1,628人增加到一年后的3,021人，以及2005年底的5,680人。
在谷歌创业之初，布林和公司的另一位创始人拉里?佩奇(Larry Page)几乎面试过所有被公司录用的人。谷歌一位前管理人士回忆说，布林有时在面试求职者时会穿得很随意，从脚踏旱冰鞋到万圣节时扮成奶牛的模样。即使是现在，布林和佩奇两人中至少有一位每周还会逐一审核公司内部雇佣委员会报上来的拟雇佣者名单，有时他们会因对某个人的资质有疑问而要求内部雇佣委员会重新予以考虑。
据了解谷歌情况的人士说，该公司一直很看重应聘人的学业表现，喜欢聘用那些名校毕业生。伯克说，应聘人的大学成绩是公司考虑的一个因素，公司聘用的大多数人在校时学习成绩都不错。但他说谷歌没有正式的学习成绩要求标准，并说公司新招聘的一些人虽没上过大学但却有良好的工作业绩。
但最近到谷歌应聘的人却说该公司的招聘程序仍嫌冗长。一位今年参加过谷歌为一高级非工程类职位所举行面试的人说，从应聘者的角度看该公司的招聘程序相当漫长。这位应聘者在参加完谷歌两次面试后一个多月仍未从该公司得到确切答复，他最终选择到另外一家公司上班。
今年24岁的丹尼尔?伯恩斯坦(Daniel Bernstein)最近曾应聘过谷歌的一个企业沟通职位。在5月份与该公司作过初步接触并通过了两轮电话测试后，他终于获邀到谷歌的总部参加面试，在那里他分别接受了该公司约6位人士的面试，其间曾被邀请到谷歌的食堂就餐，并得到了一只装着印有“Google”字样的T恤衫以及笔记本和钢笔的礼品袋。他还被布置了几项“家庭作业”，包括撰写一份个人陈述并为谷歌未来将推出的一项产品制定营销计划。
今年8月，谷歌通知伯恩斯坦去该公司接受第二轮面试，他说这一轮又包括四到五次单独的面试。而在此之前伯恩斯坦已决定要去一家初创企业工作，并已接受了网络即时通讯服务提供商Meebo Inc.提供的职位。
伯克拒绝就个案发表评论，但他表示谷歌试图在使应聘者和谷歌相互充分了解与加快招聘进程之间求得平衡。他还说，过去几个月中谷歌从接到求职信到最终决定是否录用之间的时间间隔已大为缩短，并说谷歌希望有朝一日至少在部分职位的招聘中能做到面试当天就能把最终人选定下来。
在谷歌今年6月进行的内部调查中，公司员工被要求回答约300个标准化试题，包括他们第一次使用电脑时的年龄、能说几种外语以及拥有几项专利等等。谷歌的人事部门会根据30到40项影响工作表现的因素对每位参加调查者的答卷进行分析，从而找出谷歌在招聘过程中应重点关注的方面。
这一方法不是没有风险的。宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院的管理学教授兼该院人力资源中心主任彼得?卡普利(Peter Cappelli)说，这项工作真的很难做，你很有可能得出错误的结论从而降低招聘工作的质量。
谷歌目前正在试着改革其招聘工作，例如增加对应聘者的短问卷提问，并尝试不同形式的面试。该公司还在考虑缩短招聘过程，希望仅仅经过两次面试就能做出是否聘用某些人的决定。
以往，谷歌的面试官在给被面试者写评语时没有统一的格式，他们只需给被面试人打一个总分即可。而现在，面试官则被要求针对四个具体方面(谷歌未透露是哪几个方面)给被面试人分别写出评语，并就被面试人的知识水平、技能和能力分别打分。
此外，谷歌还设计出了可以了解应聘人以往经历、个性和所偏好工作方式的短问卷。问卷中提出的问题包括：你曾从事过有薪酬的非技术性工作吗(遛狗、跑堂、家教等)？你认为自己的决断力有多强？你是愿意带领其他人完成工作还是喜欢自己单独完成工作？
但这里也有对某些应聘者不利的消息。今年7月，谷歌的首席执行长埃里克?施密特(Eric Schmidt)对分析师们说，该公司目前可能会提高招聘新人的标准。虽然伯克表示很难具体说明谷歌怎样提高了用人标准，但他说自己领导的人力资源部正在寻觅“能被提拔四到六次的人”，而公司其他部门雇佣的也是能力超过其应聘职位所要求的人。伯克说，谷歌业务的快速增长意味着，公司每个现有职位的职责范围都在快速扩展。
Kevin J. Delaney
