Google's Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm

An anonymous reader tipped us to a New York Times article about Google's newest HR tool: an algorithm. Starting soon, the company (which gets roughly 100,000 applications a month) will require all interested applicants to fill out an in-depth survey. They'll be using a sophisticated algorithm to work through the submitted surveys, matching applicants with positions. The company has apparently doubled in size in each of the last three years. Even though it's already 10,000 employees strong Laszlo Bock, Google's vice president for people operations, sees no reason the company won't reach 20,000 by the end of the year. This will mean hiring something like 200 people a week, every week, all year. From the article: "Even as Google tries to hire more people faster, it wants to make sure that its employees will fit into its freewheeling culture. The company boasts that only 4 percent of its work force leaves each year, less than other Silicon Valley companies. And it works hard to retain people, with copious free food, time to work on personal projects and other goodies. Stock options and grants certainly encourage employees to stay long enough to take advantage of the company's surging share price. Google's hiring approach is backed by academic research showing that quantitative information on a person's background -- called 'biodata' among testing experts -- is indeed a valid way to look for good workers."

Comments

Re:Thankfully they changed the GPA thing

[panaceaa]

I've been working at Google for four months, and of all the companies I interviewed at, Google seemed to care the least about my past projects, experience, or my GPA. Google's interviewing process is all about finding very smart computer people. You simply must know the core computer science principles, but it does not matter if you were able to regurgitate them on your college exams. It matters that you can explain them in an interview and use them towards solving a problem. Once I got here, I can understand the reasoning behind the hiring process: Lots of Google infrastructure and technology is unique to Google. Look at the published articles on Bigtable and MapReduce to get a glimpse of the unique systems used every day here. For people to learn these systems and begin being productive quickly, Google doesn't care if you have an MSCE or know the syntax of Apache's httpd.conf. Google just needs you to be smart.

note: These are my opinions and not necessarily those of Google's. And I try not to post on Google articles nowadays, but this doesn't pertain to our business strategy so I'm comfortable sharing it. BTW we had an awesome free lunch today here in Kirkland, Washington. :)

Re:A lawsuit waiting to happen

[Jerf]

Your post triggered an interesting thought process.

Google knows AI and machine learning; even if they don't use it they'll have people who know about it.

Suppose by asking certain questions, and doing some initial research and calibration, I can determine your age within two years with 97% certainty. Or marital status, or race, or any of the other protected categories. Have I broken the law? What if I don't actually do the computation? What if my computers do the computation but no human ever sees it? What if I do the computation and no human ever directly sees the result but the computer has enough power to say "No" to a hire in practice, thus still incorporating this potentially "forbidden knowledge" into the hiring decision?

(After all, asking someone about their marital status may actually be less reliable in the end; I can easily imagine 1 out of 40 people lying about something like that, or their true age/race/etc. if asked.)

This is extremely likely to be possible, and probably downright easy for Google, so this isn't just a hypothetical. And the problems this raises extends beyond this exact instance into any domain where for legal reasons, we have to cultivate ignorance; exactly what constitutes "ignorance" if you get right down to it?

20,000 vs 200 x 100?

[cei]

At the height of the dotcom bubble, Bill Gross & Idealab! had the philosophy that no company should have more than 100 employees. If your business model got above 100 employees, there was a high likelihood that you were better off dividing and spinning off other business units. (Don't know if they still preach that or not, but that was the thinking "back in the day.")

I don't know that Google would be better served as two hundred smaller companies, but at the same time, it's hard to imagine managing 20,000 employees would be any easier.

Re:Bias

[inviolet]

It will be interesting to see if any company using this technique ever get accused of racial,sexual etc bias.

What if google's statistical data (drawn from its database of performance reviews) shows that some ages, genders, races, and cultures are objectively better at a particular job than others?

Google's test will obviously avoid asking any direct questions about age, gender, and race, because that's illegal (even when objectively justifiable). However, if the test is powered by a statistics engine drawing a database of past performance reviews, then the test could unintentionally evolve to ask about such things indirectly.

An example: perhaps cat-ownership is correllated with femaleness, and femaleness is correllated with superior performance in writing technical documentation. An automated test-generator would unwittingly evolve to ask applicants about cat-ownership, in order to unwittingly select superior female candidates.

It's an amusing possibility. Indeed, it would be the free-market's way of legitimately selecting candidates based on age/gender/race while remaining underneath the legal radar.