How to get a job
"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 IQ. 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," Bock said.
"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 HR 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 non-expert 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 GPA. 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.
