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Google Respins Its Hiring Process For World Class Employees
An anonymous reader writes "Maybe you've been intrigued about working at Google (video), but unfortunately you slept through some of those economics classes way back in college. And you wouldn't know how to begin figuring out how many fish there are in the Great Lakes. Relax; Google has decided that GPAs and test scores are pretty much useless for evaluating candidates, except (as a weak indicator) for fresh college graduates. And they've apparently retired brain teasers as an interview screening device (though that's up for debate). SVP Laszlo Beck admitted to the New York Times that an internal evaluation of the effectiveness of its interview process produced sobering results: 'We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It's a complete random mess.' This sounds similar to criticism of Google's hiring process occasionally levied by outsiders. Beck says Google also isn't convinced of the efficacy of big data in judging the merits of employees either for individual contributor or leadership roles, although they haven't given up on it either."
This has led TechCrunch to declare that the technical interview will soon be dead.
Innovation sometimes leads to a dead end. Doesn't mean it's not worth trying.
I've just gone through interviews at Google and Apple.
At Google, I was asked mainly theoretical questions - big-O, maths/stats, etc. And one "real" architecture/design question at the end. There were 5 interviewers and maybe 7 questions, sometimes 2 per interviewer but usually just 1 that lasted the whole hour. According to my recruiter before the decision, it was maybe 50/50 that I'd get an offer, and I did very well on the real-system design question (by inference, not so well on the others :). I didn't get the job.
At Apple, I had a seven-hour interview with seven interviewers. There were many many questions, far too many to easily remember categories, but they were all focussed on things I might end up doing, or problems that I might end up encountering. I got the job. I guess I do better with "real world" issues than the "consider two sets of numbers, one is ... the other is ...) type.
I have the self-confidence^W^W arrogance to believe I'm an asset to pretty much any company out there, but interview processes are nothing more than a gamble. Sure you can weed out the obvious under-qualified applicants, but frankly (unless the candidate is lying, and in the US that's a real no-no, in the UK padding your CV seems to be sort of expected...) that sort of candidate ought to have been pre-vetoed by the recruiter before getting to the interview.
I've yet to see the interview that guarantees a good candidate will do well. It's all about preparation: can you implement quicksort or mergesort right now, without looking it up ? The algorithm takes about 20 lines of code... Some interviews will require you to have knowledge like that; others are more concerned with how you collaborate with other candidates; still others are concerned with your code quality (I've seen a co-interviewer downmark a candidate for missing a ; at the end of a coding line. I wasn't impressed ... by the co-interviewer. But that's another story); still others are ... you get my point. Whether you do well or not can depend more on the cross-intersectional area of the interviewers style and your own credo than any knowledge you may or may not have.
So go in there expecting to be surprised, prepare what you can, be prepared to do wacky things to please "the man" interviewing you. For a good candidate, over a large number of interviews, you'll do well. The problem is that we often want a specific job, and we get depressed by the first dozen or so failed interviews. There's nothing more you can do than pick yourself up and try again. It's instructive to note that second-interviews at companies often go better than first-interviews, possibly because you're forewarned about the style a bit more, and therefore a bit better prepared...
Physicists get Hadrons!
So I guess the real conclusion is to hire as many candidates as you can as contract to hire or other temporary positions so you can rate their performance for a few months and easily drop them if they aren't cutting it.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Correct. I am not a great fan of Google but I must admit they have guts to admit inefficiency of their solution and move on and possibly even learn from mistakes as some of us do.
I had one guy who got divorced weeks after I contracted him and just lost all ability to focus. Unfortunate circumstances but life happens and you've got to roll with it. Had to let him go. Wasn't pulling his weight.
I'm sure getting fired right after a divorce helped him learn the lesson of “just rolling with it.” How come you didn't “just roll with” the guy’s temporary difficulty? Oh right, because you didn’t have to. Your livelihood didn’t depend on it so that made it okay to shit on other people. Compassion and accomodation are only for people who have no other choice.
I had one guy who got divorced weeks after I contracted him and just lost all ability to focus. Unfortunate circumstances but life happens and you've got to roll with it. Had to let him go. Wasn't pulling his weight.
You're an American manager alright. You took a gigantic shit on someone who was already hurting.
People like you are the reason I left the job market for good. And I'm better qualified than everyone you have ever hired or will ever hire for any job.