I had just submitted the OLD link summarizing last summer's interview to HN today (to answer a question that came up overnight about Google's hiring practices),

I had just submitted the OLD link summarizing last summer's interview to HN today (to answer a question that came up overnight about Google's hiring practices), and I see that the author here was just as struck by the statement from last summer, "G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything." In more complete context, from last summer's interview by another New York Times writer,[1] that statement was "One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything." So, yes, if you have little work experience and were in full-time school recently, Google will ask you about your G.P.A. But if you have substantial industry experience, Google will ask you about that, or at least such is the claim here about current Google practice. Some comments posted before this comment mentioned the confusing way that "general cognitive ability" is said not to be the same thing as IQ. No psychologist, and especially no psychologist specializing in industrial and organizational psychology, would speak that way. The universal statement in that branch of psychology is that IQ scores are a very good indicator of "general cognitive ability" indeed, the least expensive and most efficient indicator possible for most hiring situations. I think the Google executive interviewed in today's article and in last summer's article is just trying to be legally correct while eating his cake and having it. In the United States, there are tricky legal issues surrounding using IQ tests as a hiring criterion that grow out of the Griggs v. Duke Power case decision by the United States Supreme Court.[2] IQ tests are disfavored as a hiring criterion by that decisions (but the little known fact is that so are educational credentials disfavored as a hiring criterion[3] by the same case), so companies tend to try to use more expensive, less reliable proxies of IQ tests to get the results that IQ tests would give them more reliably and less expensively. [1] "In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal" 19 June 2013 by Adam Bryant http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b... [2] http://www.naacpldf.org/case/griggs-v-duke-power-co http://www.naacpldf.org/case/griggs-v-duke-power-co [3] http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/iq_and_hiring_d.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/iq_and_hiring_d....