I’m on the record as agreeing with Former Netscape wonderboy, Marc Andreessen, that it’s dangerous to view Google’s approach to Talent as too special. A focus on the PhD is OK at times, but when you have to have the heavy academic pedigree to get any job at a company, you’re going to miss out on some COLD BLOODED killers from the local community college who will out-hustle and out-scrap you.
If you’re in a college bowl situation, you probably want the PhD. If you’re in a fistfight, the community
college guys looks pretty good.
Here’s another cautionary angle to the Google approach. When you are rejecting thousands of applicants per week, the body count gets kind of high. If they are told, or have simply read, that they’re not smart enough to work at your company, are you building an alumni of rejectees motivated to knock you down?
One take from Systematic HR:
"Bringing back the Google example, there has been more than one applicant who came away from interviews at Google with the distinct impression that Google thought they were simply not “smart” enough. Indeed, people who have accepted positions there have verified that “smart” is a very important and leading quality for any candidate. This sense from rejected applicants that they don’t make the cut could really harm Google in the long run. At some point, they won’t be the trendy company to work for (think Microsoft), and public opinion and how they have treated large masses of people will matter."
It’s Revenge of the Nerds, except in reverse. Ultimately, Google’s growth rate is going to cool off, and that will be the event that brings the company back to the pack. When that happens, and Google has to out-excute players who have entered the search/ad space, there’s undoubtedly going to be many rejectees with a little extra motivation to steal business from the G-team.
And that’s ultimately good for capitalism. "You told me no, I read in Fortune I wasn’t smart enough, and now I’m going to take my SE Indiana State Tech diploma and take all your customers by working 14 hours a day".
Nobody is more motivated than a jilted candidate who goes head-to-head with the perpetrator of the crime…
Do you ever watch the TV Programme ‘The Apprentice’?It is supposed to be a collection of talented individuals who get put onto stretch assignments. All are competing for a job with Alan Sugar.
Sadly most of them have a low IQ and an even lower EQ. I just posted a clip on my blog today:
http://learn2develop.blogspot.com
I think that eventually your prediction will come true. Using standardized methods like this will wreck the edge that Google currently has. That makes me sad because I love Google enough to marry it.
Google reminds me of Lucent Technologies about 10 years ago. They would look down at anybody (read: potential hire) not having a PhD from MIT, Harvard or Stanford. They considered sales guys as “inferior people” because they did not have the same analytical background as the research guys.
Eventually they crashed. In a very competitive environment, it’s not the research/academic type of guys with multiple PhDs that are going to help you win in the long term. To succeed in business, you need people good at… doing business. Does not matter if their IQ is “only” 115.
Google is still in the “we can do no wrong” stage of growth. They’re there because they’ve done a bunch of things right and because they’ve gotten lucky. That will not continue forever.
So far, the “hire the academic-pedigreed bright people” strategy has worked. Those folks and the climate they work in have come up with some amazing innovations. That may continue forever, but it may not be enough.
At some point there will be a real test of whether Google’s version of the “the best and the brightest” hiring strategy works any better than the similar strategy that got us into the Viet Nam War or the powerful object lesson that is Enron.
The issue, always, is that bright is not enough. When crunch time comes, we’ll find out if those high-IQ PhDs have the other qualities that Google will need.