My resume is spotty and I don't interview well, but...
SteveEveryone in HR/Talent/Workforce land has bee ALL OVER the recent piece in the New York Times that featured a conversation with Google's head of people operations Laszlo Bock and dug into some of the data-driven insights about hiring, management, leadership, and overall talent management at one of the world's most innovative companies.
By now you've seen or read the headlines, or 'tweetable' moments from the piece.
College GPA doesn't matter. College degrees may not matter as much as we've always thought. The classic Silicon Valley 'brain teaser' type interview questions like 'How many golf balls would fit into the Empire State Building?' serve the interviewer's ego much more than they serve to help identify talent. And finally, with rare exceptions, most managers are really bad at interviewing, or said differently, at 'spotting talent.'
Everything in the Bock/Google piece seems kind of intuitive, and kind of validates what probably lots of HR/Talent folks have thought all along - but were or at least felt kind of powerless to to butt up against.
Posting job specs that say things like 'Bachelor's degree required, MBA preferred' or 'Ten years progressive experience in exactly the same field/industry/discipline that we are currently hiring for, culminating with five years performing exactly the same job somewhere else that we want you to do here', are much more the norm that the exception. Most of us can't, like Google seems to have been able to, 'prove' that college GPAs and specific degrees are not that relevant and predictive of performance so we are kind of forced back into what we feel, or think, or what is most easily defensible when a 'bad hire' occurs.
"Well, he had a 3.7 from MIT in Electrical Engineering - he should have been able to hack it here." You get the idea.
Create rigorous (and potentially exclusionary) enough job requirements and then you're covered - anyone who actually meets those specs and for some reason doesn't turn out to be successful in the organization - well that is their fault not yours. I get why that is comforting to organizations but in the long run, and as eloquently described by Google's Mr. Bock, really doesn't help the organization in finding (and unearthing) the talent they need to thrive.
Recently, I had a conversation with an old friend - an accomplished professional, the holder of an advanced degree from a great institution, but who has had some career ups and downs over the last few years.
While we were talking, one thing specifically stood out to me. He said, 'Sure my resume has a couple of gaps, and once I had to take a job that I was really overqualified for just to keep the bills paid , but I tell you, my main problem I think is that I am just not great at interviewing. Let me in there, give me a chance to show what I can do and I will be fine - but the show, the performance, the song-and-dance that interviews seem to be, well, I just don't do that well at them.'
Our pal Laszlo at Google, for all the data-driven insight that he is applying towards the hiring process isn't advocating scrapping interviews, and my friend here probably wouldn't benefit too much from ditching the kinds of criteria he'd always relied upon - like the 'right degree'.
But I do think the key take away from the Google experience is that questioning long-held beliefs about what makes for a good candidate (and a good hire), is more important than ever.
For your shop it might be degrees, or years of experience, or 'nailing' the interview. Whatever criteria you have, maybe it's time to take a closer look to see if that criteria does more than simply week people out, but rather actually helps to identify people who will succeed, while not unnecessarily casting people aside.
Reader Comments (3)
College degrees certainly matter in a lot of fields (or else why would anyone bother to get them?). But I think the takeaway for me is that hiring requirements should be specific to the type of field, instead of a boilerplate list of requirements (GPA, degree, years of experience) that serve more to cover the hiring manager's behind. Does a graphic designer need a college degree if his portfolio is amazing? Probably not. Does a lawyer need to have graduated from a law school? Um, probably yes.
Thanks Cari for your comments. To me, and when I have the chance to talk to people that are frustrated with the job search process, the 'I just am not that good at interviewing' issue comes up a lot. I think that some of the advances in video interviewing tech might actually help there, since usually the interviewee can practice a bit and then only submit their answer once they feel comfortable they have expressed themselves well.
Send resume to the mind! His need to do so that would-employer from him could not have torn off!