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02 Friedman, How To Get A Job at Google

Google values general cognitive ability, leadership skills, humility, and ownership over traditional qualifications like GPA. They look for employees who can learn quickly, collaborate well, and adapt to new information. A degree alone does not guarantee ability to do a job; what matters most is what you can do and how you apply your knowledge.

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27 views

02 Friedman, How To Get A Job at Google

Google values general cognitive ability, leadership skills, humility, and ownership over traditional qualifications like GPA. They look for employees who can learn quickly, collaborate well, and adapt to new information. A degree alone does not guarantee ability to do a job; what matters most is what you can do and how you apply your knowledge.

Uploaded by

hripsime.stepanyann
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Thomas L.

Friedman, How to Get a Job at Google

FEB. 22, 2014

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — LAST June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The Times,
Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e., the guy in charge
of hiring for one of the world‟s most successful companies — noted that Google had determined
that “G.P.A.‟s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found
that they don‟t predict anything.” He also noted that the “proportion of people without any
college education at Google has increased over time” — now as high as 14 percent on some
teams. At a time when many people are asking, “How‟s my kid gonna get a job?” I thought it
would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer.

Don‟t get him wrong, Bock begins, “Good grades certainly don‟t hurt.” Many jobs at Google
require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those
areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more.

“There are five hiring attributes we have across the company,” explained Bock. “If it‟s a
technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical
roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it‟s not
I.Q. It‟s learning ability. It‟s the ability to process on the fly. It‟s the ability to pull together
disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we
validate to make sure they‟re predictive.”

The second, he added, “is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to


traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you
vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don‟t care. What we care about is,
when faced with a problem and you‟re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step
in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else?
Because what‟s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to
relinquish power.”

What else? Humility and ownership. “It‟s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of
ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and
embrace the better ideas of others. “Your end goal,” explained Bock, “is what can we do together
to problem-solve. I‟ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.”

And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it‟s “intellectual
humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn.” It is why research shows that many
graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. “Successful bright people rarely experience
failure, and so they don‟t learn how to learn from that failure,” said Bock.

“They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens,
it‟s because I‟m a genius. If something bad happens, it‟s because someone‟s an idiot or I didn‟t
get the resources or the market moved. ... What we‟ve seen is that the people who are the most
successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They‟ll argue like hell. They‟ll
be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, „here‟s a new fact,‟ and they‟ll go, „Oh,
well, that changes things; you‟re right.‟ ” You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at
the same time.

The least important attribute they look for is “expertise.” Said Bock: “If you take somebody who
has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills,
and you hire them as an H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and
you compare them with someone who‟s been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the
expert will go: „I‟ve seen this 100 times before; here‟s what you do.‟ ” Most of the time the
nonexpert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, “because most of the time it‟s not
that hard.” Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they‟ll also
come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.

To sum up Bock‟s approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in
so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one — besides
brand-name colleges. Because “when you look at people who don‟t go to school and make their
way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to
find those people.” Too many colleges, he added, “don‟t deliver on what they promise. You
generate a ton of debt, you don‟t learn the most useful things for your life. It‟s [just] an extended
adolescence.”

Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like G.P.A. For
most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the
tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware.
Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays
off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn‟t care how you learned it). And in
an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills —
leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true
no matter where you go to work.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 23, 2014, on page SR11 of the New York
edition with the headline: How to Get a Job at Google.

Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-get-a-job-at-


google.html

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