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Want To Work At Google?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bread-and-circuses dept.

ramboando writes "In an article on the ZDNet site 'chief culture officer' and HR boss Stacy Savides Sullivan describes the kind of traits that she's looking for in potential Google employees. If you're thinking about applying, she also goes over what kind of questions one might be asked in an interview, Google's 'happiness survey' and the best perks that makes employees tick and stay with the company (Google ski-trips or paid paternity leave, anyone?). 'I think one of the hardest things to do is ensure that we are hiring people who possess the kind of traits that we're looking for in a Google-y employee. Google-y is defined as somebody who is fairly flexible, adaptable and not focusing on titles and hierarchy, and just gets stuff done. So, we put a lot of focus in our hiring processes when we are interviewing to try to determine first and foremost does the person have the skill set and experience potential to do the job from a background standpoint in addition to academics and credentials.'"

2 of 458 comments (clear)

  1. Re:"Fit Factor" by rsmah · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Business is a team sport. The "fit" of an individual is as important as raw skill/talent.

    Cheers,
    Rob

  2. Re:"Fit Factor" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    She also doesn't mention that to Google, hiring is mathematically equivalent to Information Retrieval, except that they only care about "precision" not "recall".

    What that means to lay-people is that so long as they can maintain 10,000 applications coming through per-month, false negatives (passing on a suitable applicant) do not matter because there'll be another candidate along in a minute. False positives (hiring an unsuitable applicant) are all they need to focus on. The "fit factor" is effectively the search string of traits; however, with such a large candidate pool, they can focus their "hiring algorithm" entirely on rejecting candidates where it is even slightly difficult to ascertain whether they fit or not.

    So, their advertising blitz "aren't we a great place to work for" is a part of what lets them keep their hiring process easy. If they get bad PR and applications fall, then they'll need to worry about recall as well as precision.