Slashdot Mirror
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."
It will be interesting to see if any company using this technique ever get accused of racial,sexual etc bias.
"But the computer chose them! You're not going to sue my computer, are you?"
Tomorrow Google online dating?
Do you feel guilty when you masturbate?
Do you enjoy harming animals?
Sounds like someone got one of these shirts for Christmas and took it to heart.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Applicant is honest in their response to the survey.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I was one of those people who was hired with the under 3.0 GPA, and while getting the interviews was difficult, the people doing the interviewing really didn't care. They asked me to solve problems and show that I could do the job, and that was all they cared about.
Luckily for me I dont have to worry about it anymore, but especially in the technology field why should GPA be more important than actual projects and experience?
It's easy to maintain a low turnover of staff as long as the vast majority of your staff isn't fully vested, and the stock is moving upwards. As soon as the growth in staff numbers slow down, though, you're going to see the turnover percentage increase significantly as a larger and larger percentage of staff have been there for the full 4 year vesting period of their options, and the company starts seeing pressure for lower refresher grants.
You can't hide bad questions behind an algorythm. The interview process has lots of laws around it now, and it's well established that there are only some questions you can ask. Here's a great example:
The questions range from the age when applicants first got excited about computers...
This question doesn't directly reveal your age, but a clever interviewer can glean much from it. "Oh, got excited in computers at 22, eh? Probably older than I thought. We don't want old employees we want young ones."
It is illegal to ask some questions in an interview. Age related questions are one of them. You are only allowed to ask questions that pertain to your performance of the job at hand. For example, I can ask someone "would you have a problem lifting heavy boxes?" but I can't ask how old you are and make a judgement because you are 40 that you can't lift heavy boxes. The above question you as a logical geek might think is iffy, but to a lawyer, it's shark bait and they'll be all over it, so don't ask it. If you ask a question that falls into this category, you open yourself up to a gender/age/racial discrimination lawsuit. These and many others are protected classes under the law.
And there's a great reason why an interview is a poor indicator of performance... because people lie!!! It's a sales process. They want your job, and you want the best candidate. Last two people I let go both gave great interviews, but when they actually worked, they sucked. They had all the right answers in the interview, but there is no escaping performance reviews.
0% firing rate is impossible, as is 100% retention. 96% retention is a stellar figure, even for silicon valley. I think they should be pretty happy that number.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
At the time I thought it was kind of rude, really. What business is it of yours if I "consider myself an outgoing person"? After asing me a few preliminary questions he left the room and had me fill out responses on a computer program. I specifically remember one screen with something like 50-100 checkboxes that asked you to check which ones you felt applied to your personality type. It was then followed by the identical screen, this time to be filled out with "how you thought people saw you". A good half hours worth, many more screens, a personal essay, by the end I was rather ... pissed, actually spent about half of my time deciding whether to be polite or not (I'm sure the test was sensitive enough to detect this and needless to say they didn't call me back). At the time I thought the the HR guy had convinced the company to buy him a new toy and was busy tormenting all the new hires with it.
In any case I'd be curious to hear people's responses to such. Do you think this is fair? As is probably clear from the above, I think it's way out of bounds and personally intrusive.
Lest you think the Google stuff is all technical, here's a quote from the article:
"Some questions were factual: What programming languages are you familiar with? What Internet mailing lists do you subscribe to? Some looked for behavior: Is your work space messy or neat? And some looked at personality: Are you an extrovert or an introvert? And some fell into no traditional category in the human resources world: What magazines do you subscribe to? What pets do you have? "We wanted to cast a very wide net," Mr. Bock said. "It is not unusual to walk the halls here and bump into dogs. Maybe people who own dogs have some personality trait that is useful."
Everyone knows that a growing company loses money, no? (ah, Dilbert!)
10,000 employees??? What the heck are they doing? 20,000 employees next year? How the heck do they manage to coordinate anything??? Do they even -have- a corporate culture, or agenda?
Lets see... 10,000 employees, on average, costing the corp ~$200k each... that's... $20 billion a year... in salaries/benefits/office space/etc. Are they even making that much? Are they paying their workers with ``profits'' from stock sales?
Either their salaries are low (and employees work for stock options), or something is fishy.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
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.
This sig intentionally left justified.
Man holes are round because if they were square, they'd fall in the hole, Mr Fuji, and I'd move the mountain with smoke and mirrors or perhaps optical rays into retnas.
bool recommend = true;
if (surveyResults == Evil())
forwardResumeToMicrsoft(bool recommend);
hire();
ACK NAK RST
(last line of TFA)
> "More and more in the time I've been here, we hire people based on experience as a proxy for what they can accomplish," he said. "Last week we hired six people who had below a 3.0 G.P.A."
Arrrgh! It's like saying: "Last week we hired six people who weren't white."
Augurs poorly for GOOG.
"Piter, too, is dead."
I'm shocked that the company hasn't yet started to fade or lose its reputation as a congregation of geniuses, given that with all the reqs they're having to fill, they're bound to be hiring in a less discriminate fashion than they used to. Those new lesser employees in turn conduct interviews, which begets another batch of lesser employees, until eventually you hire just about anybody with a CS degree. Meanwhile, your founding geniuses cash out their millions and go live in Hawaii, leaving their jobs to be filled by lesser talent. Ultimately this leveling of talent begins to show in the quality of your products, which in turn leads to a decline in your company's reputation, and before you know it Google is another bloated bug ridden software company that gets its daily dose of malignment on slashdot.
But eventually, profits will level off and then start to decline. Nothing goes up forever. And when the money gets tight, Google will suddenly realize that they've got a whole bunch of people that they don't really need.
If the come to the interview dressed like crap, they're automatically out. If they turn up late, they're automatically out.
It's facinating to me the utter-crap voodoo that some people having in making hiring decisions. People like yourself actually believe there's these simple little tests that seperate the good from the bad.
Did you ever consider that all you're doing is just trying to hire people like yourself? You may think that's a great way to seperate the good from the bad... but you may eventually discover that any workplace relies on a variety of people with different personalities, attitudes, and "views of the world". Hire too many people like yourself, and you might just wind up with a bunch of people that can't see outside of the box you've built. If you want a perfect example of this problem, look no further than the Bush administration.
AccountKiller
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Did they really? How fucking stupid can such a decision be? I know plenty of people who went to Rutgers (state university in NJ) for undergrad. and are *extremely* bright. Their parents just didn't have $100,000+ to blow on a top-tier private or out-of-state education, at least not without selling their home or dipping into retirement. Not did the kids want to leave school $100k in debt.
-b.
I can't believe they would deliberately make decisions on the basis of anything that was not obviously going to help them. First, they are a global corporation, so institutionalizing a lack of diversity would seem suicidal. And second, leaving someone who could do something cool deliberately on the sidewalk is an invitation to them to start a competing company that does better. So I have to believe they have a genuine desire to grow.
On the other hand, while they might not do something like that deliberately, anyone could do it by accident. People have built random number generators that turned out not to be random. People have built perceptron recognizers for tanks on a battlefield that turned out to be recognizing the time of day the pictures were shot rather than the tanks. People can confuse themselves with their own "intelligence".
The weird thing is that they say they chose to use their own data to seed their algorithm with their own people. If they already have such people, why wouldn't their present hiring practices be fine for finding them? I heard a talk by Amar Bose of the Bose corporation where, among his several messages, was a catch phrase "better implies different". So if Google wants to grow and become better, patterning its growth on "more of same" seems bizarre.
I've also not seen ethical guidelines published by Google that says they're afraid to use their own data. Perhaps they do or perhaps they don't. But absent clear promises not to use data in certain ways, I'm not confident of what they're doing. Surely they receive search strings from people typing to computers at successful companies they admire and would like to emulate. A lot can be learned from examining those strings in the aggregate, I'd bet. (Even if they didn't work back from the IP addresses, they could cross-correlate the searches against "anonymous" information about "all searches from sites that seem business-related" and get similar results that were at least superficially "ethically cleaner"... though it's still second-hand use of data that others who don't own search engines don't have access to). And surely they must have their own internal search data (things their employees have typed) and the results of these profiles they asked for from their employees, too. So they can create a psychological map of the areas their employees inquire about and compare it to what the world is interested in. Surely a cross-match of that will reveal "interests" and "skills" and "areas of inquiry" and other useful stuff that they could beef up on in hiring in order to see and shore up their "weaknesses". Surely something like that would be more likely to reveal what they need to hire for. Not that I think it ethically a good idea, but given that they haven't promised not to, somehow I'd be surprised if they weren't utilizing that vast quantity of knowledge about what people search for in order to know what to hire next, if not what research areas to go into or what products to develop. Search engines already count the number of searches for various things and correlate them to events and products to find out the popularity of all manner of things in today's fashion culture. Sometimes that data is just for coffee station chatter (e.g., "more people searched for thus-and-so sport at this year's olympics than last"), but eventually (or behind the scenes already) it may be more (e.g., "people are asking awfully specific legal questions about thus-and-so kind of genetic research at thus-and-so company")...
I've discounted the hypothesis that, like the "all volunteer" US Army, they're having so much trouble getting v
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
The solution to this is to interview with them, and somehow screw up.
;-)
Google has a strange recruitment process, they never ask what you are currently doing or where you live, they just find a few old web pages in their cache and assume they're current. It was on the 5th interview when the Google interviewer suddenly realised I wasn't a programmer, but I knew enough CompSci to have struggled through 4 interviews. They had the idea I was a major F/L OSS programmer based on all my activity in mailing lists, not a guy just helping test one project. They had also found an old Irish mobile phone number that forwards to my current phone, and assumed I lived in Ireland.
After a few mumbled promises to send my current CV to the right group, within hours I received a "No Job For You" form letter and I seem to have been put on a black list internally. The stream of recruitment emails have trickled off to maybe one every two months.
It's funny, because I run into senior Google people at trade events who try to recruit me because they know my reputation. When I tell them I've already been rejected for a junior level programmer position in an HR blunder a couple years ago, you can see their faces fall. They know that once Google rejects someone, there's little chance of getting them in past HR, but some senior guys are working to reform their broken system.
Getting rejected is a great solution if you never want to work there and limit those spammish requests. Since they are offering you a job, tell them you want to be head of HR
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it's crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein