4 ms·

> Q: Hiring? > A: One of our rules was, we don’t want to hire your friends. Another rule was not to hire people from “lesser” universities. Another rule was to

> Q: Hiring? > A: One of our rules was, we don’t want to hire your friends. Another rule was not to hire people from “lesser” universities. Another rule was to only hire people with good GPAs. It was frustrating, but it meant that we ended up with a lot of really smart people from great universities, and that served us well. I wonder what led to Google changing their minds and not considering the GPA as a part of hiring decisions.

srtjstjsj 11y ago
They ran out of perfectly pedigreed people to hire, when they got big and competitors offered better prospects.
- bordercases 11y ago
  This is my guess. Recently Google began to aggressively recruit at my university over the last two years or so. The cynical question is, of course, "why only in the last two years?" when our particular CS program has been around since the 80s. The recruiter claimed that it was because more people started to be hired out of my school. But that still isn't sufficient to discount this possibility. Granted I'm living in a country that isn't the U.S., that could have played a role. But I'm not confident either way.
5hank3rat0r 11y ago
I believe this was done after taking a look at GPA and post-hiring performance at Google. This was not mentioned in the OP, but I guess they realized that there wasn't any or, maybe in certain positions (non-research/entry devs/etc), a negative correlation between the GPA and performance.
quentinp 11y ago
They looked at the data. In Work Rules!, Laszlo Bock (head of People Operations at Google) writes: « So in 2007 we started looking for themes across the ten thousand or so people we had hired, as well as the millions we didn’t. 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: 1. 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. » The three others are Leadership, "Googleyness" and Role-Related Knowledge.

srtjstjsj 11y ago

They ran out of perfectly pedigreed people to hire, when they got big and competitors offered better prospects.

bordercases 11y ago
This is my guess. Recently Google began to aggressively recruit at my university over the last two years or so. The cynical question is, of course, "why only in the last two years?" when our particular CS program has been around since the 80s. The recruiter claimed that it was because more people started to be hired out of my school. But that still isn't sufficient to discount this possibility. Granted I'm living in a country that isn't the U.S., that could have played a role. But I'm not confident either way.

5hank3rat0r 11y ago

I believe this was done after taking a look at GPA and post-hiring performance at Google. This was not mentioned in the OP, but I guess they realized that there wasn't any or, maybe in certain positions (non-research/entry devs/etc), a negative correlation between the GPA and performance.

quentinp 11y ago

They looked at the data. In Work Rules!, Laszlo Bock (head of People Operations at Google) writes: « So in 2007 we started looking for themes across the ten thousand or so people we had hired, as well as the millions we didn’t. 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: 1. 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. » The three others are Leadership, "Googleyness" and Role-Related Knowledge.