The mismeasure of employees

Google’s hiring process is as legendary for its difficulty, rigor, and thoroughness, as it is for its snobbery, byzantine scheduling, and unmannerly interviews.

From its inception, Google’s approach to hiring codified a geek’s secret-society pledge rush: a dozen interviewers, blackball elimination, math and coding tests, and the provision of one’s academic grades, sometimes decades after the fact.

Advocates averred that the difficulties endured ensured that no jerks would be hired; that the large number of interviewers probabilistically cut down the chance that human screening errors would go unrectified; that intellectual standards would be upheld and only the best would join the singular team building the fastest-growing company in world history.

Detractors declaimed that groupthink ruled, ensuring that only the blandest of candidates would not snag a rough edge of personality on the closing door; that in practical terms, political horse-trading between managers determined hiring preferences; that academic and business success are not highly correlated in any event; and that requiring a double-digit quorum of staffers to make any business decision presumes their individual incompetence.

A revealing peek behind the curtain comes from Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig who shared this analysis:

One of the interesting things we’ve found, when trying to predict how well somebody we’ve hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four, and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success.
Ninety-nine percent of the people who got a one in one of their interviews we didn’t hire. But the rest of them, in order for us to hire them somebody else had to be so passionate that they pounded on the table and said, “I have to hire this person because I see something in him…”

Now, one person’s “so passionate” certainly counts for something and is in itself a positive signal. And it is a good sign that Google is doing the math after the fact to improve their recruiting efforts.

But what we learn from the story is that even the most data-driven, truth-comes-first company cultures can get wrapped up in what “should” work rather than what “does” work.

“Should” is a common trap in how we hire. After all, we’ve been making assessments of our fellow human beings since the crib. Choosing mates, playdates, loves and hates — as social creatures a vast amount of our human experience is composed of picking other people.

So it is natural that we bring the lessons from those experiences into our work life. Often implicitly, we assume that what has worked for us all through our life “should” work in business. And why wouldn’t it? It’s what got you here.

But a company is not a social or family environment.

Your family has to love you no matter what.

A company hires you, at arm’s length, to do a job and enters into a (mutually beneficial) contract for the duration. The relationship maintains until mutual assessments of future value, loyalty, productivity and satisfaction diverge.
And for all the reasons that assuming your boss or your employee relations are friends, rather than friendly, the heuristics that we naturally develop in these social and family environments are equally unsuited to hiring.

It places cultural fit, not work productivity, as your company’s highest value. It selects for bon homie rather than business results. It replaces the rigor with which you make other investment decisions with the certainty of more frequent failures of human capital investments — usually the most painful to unwind. And it excuses the introduction and perpetuation of inherently non-testable premises into the hiring process.

Picking mathematically gifted people who ruffle no feathers as your favorite people may have been satisfactory for your social milieu, but it does not mean the same process “should” or “will” work for hiring the best employees who will help your company achieve its business goals.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Job Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.