Slashdot Mirror
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.
"Have you ever built something that worked, show me, explain it." IMHO that is key to successfully hiring developers.
Equally important, and admittedly a little strange to some, it to ask about their personal programming projects. Nothing work related, nothing school related, just things that they sat down and programmed motivated by their own personal needs or curiosity. If a person can not offer "something" a warning bell is going off. I don't care how small, trivial, silly, etc the personal project is. I mostly want to see that personal projects exist. To me they are an indicator that the interviewee is someone who has a genuine interest in programming, that they are not merely someone who got a degree because a parent or guidance counselor told them it was a good career path.
But not because Google went about it wrong and screwed up its hiring process.
I've been now through a few hiring processes, have sat on Interviews, decision committees. And while I like to think that my Interviews and candidate ratings were spot-on (I correctly predicted one failure and one early resignation), I'm pretty sure that's just skewed by the small sample size. What I do know is that I went through all kinds of approaches, both as an interviewer and an interviewee. I've done brainteasers, role-playing, decision explanations, code walkthroughs, resume deep-dives, online candidate research, just shooting the breeze, and more. And I haven't found a single thing that strongly correlates with acing the interview or hiring a good worker. Resumes can lie (sometimes subtly), and you'll never find out without hiring a private investigator. Role-playing can confuse people, especially if they're trying to figure out what you're looking for. Brain teasers can be memorized, shooting the breeze can lead to unreasonable judgments (positive or negative), interviewers and interviewees can have a bad day, the other person doesn't like your first name, and a million other things.
Especially when you start talking 10s of thousands of interviews, you're actually looking at so much data, so many influencing variables that I doubt you can find one common variable that stands out from the rest. What I'm concerned about (and that comes partially from being married to someone in HR) is that there is still a drive to find the one process that will automate the hiring process. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist. Well, let me walk that back a tiny bit: there's one thing that will work better than anything else: have the interview done by the best people you have, have them take it seriously, and spend some time on it. But it takes time, is fuzzy, and is entirely reliant on managers knowing who their best people are.
I'm glad to see that Google doesn't think Big Data is the answer to everything. I just hope that this percolates through to the rest of the HR universe. There's much too much of a drive to automate hiring, like performance reviews and firing has been.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I have walked out of job interviews where they asked nothing but puzzles. I solve technical challenges and write code. If you really have trouble determining how many toasters you can use to cook 50 pancakes, guess what. I am not the right person for you. If you are looking for someone who can code their ass off, I am the right person.
I have interviewed hundreds of candidates over the years. I have been the hiring manager a few times and never once pulled the puzzle bullshit. I have found the best indicator in the world is to just casually bullshit about technology. You can very quickly find someones strengths, weaknesses and if they are full of it. In a casual chat, people let their guard down and you get a look in.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
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
Catch 22: they need to find a good way to hire HR people who are good at hiring.
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.
For Google interviews the answer to "run of the mill" brain teasers should be "Hang on while I Google it" ;).
And if they say no, ask them if it's better to use Bing instead.
Because (while no HR department or team manager will ever admit it in a public forum) we as a civilisation have precisely zero idea how to hire decent staff.
Oh, we'd love to pretend we do. We come up with all sorts of wonderful ideas like technical interviews (what the hell is a technical interview and how should it be structured anyway? I've never yet been given any training on that, yet I've had to devise them on a few occasions - I usually went for questions that demonstrate the candidate is trying to think through the problem in a methodical way rather than just guessing or reciting answers they've memorised), brainteasers, psychological evaluations - yet I'm quite sure we'd get just as good results on average just pulling names out of a hat.
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.