Google Admits Its Crazy Interview Questions Were ‘A Complete Waste Of Time’; Google HR Boss Explains Why GPA And Most Interviews Are Useless

Google Admits Its Crazy Interview Questions Were ‘A Complete Waste Of Time’

ALYSON SHONTELL JUN. 20, 2013, 9:38 AM 27,219 26

If you have ever experienced a job interview with Google, you know it can be grueling. Until a few years ago, Google was infamous for asking brainteasers such as, “How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?” and “Why are manholes round?” It now admits that those questions were useless. “We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s Senior VP of People Operations, tells The New York Times. “How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.” In addition to trashing brainteasers, Google is also moving away from GPA requirements. Bock says there is a correlation between good employees and high GPAs and test scores if you’re just a few years out of school. But for every other candidate, Google no longer asks for that information. What’s Google’s hiring tactic now? Bock says his team uses behavioral interviews and asks for examples of how a person acted in a particular situation. It no longer asks hypothetical questions. Google also uses structured behavior interviews with a consistent rubric for assessing each person. “The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information,” Bock says. “One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.” Google also looks for leadership examples among candidates. 

Google HR Boss Explains Why GPA And Most Interviews Are Useless

MAX NISEN JUN. 19, 2013, 10:44 PM 67,133 31

Google likely sees more data than any company on the planet. And that obsession carries through to hiring and management, where every decision and practice is endlessly studied and analyzed.In an interview with The New York Times’ Adam Bryant, Google’s Senior Vice President of People Operations Laszlo Bock explains that some of the biggest stalwarts of the hiring and recruiting world, the interview, GPA, and test scores, aren’t nearly as important as people think. 

Google doesn’t even ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, unless someone’s a year or two out of school, because they don’t correlate at all with success at the company. Even for new grads, the correlation is slight, the company has found.

Bock has an excellent explanation about why those metrics don’t mean much.

“Academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment,” he says.

While in school, people are trained to give specific answers, “it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer,” Bock says. “You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.”

As for interviews, many managers, recruiters, and HR staffers think they have a special ability to sniff out talent. They’re wrong. 

“Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring,” Bock says. “We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship.”

Google also used to be famous for posing impossibly difficult and punishing brain teasers during interviews. Things like “If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?”

Turns out those questions are”a complete waste of time,” according to Bock. “They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”

The only thing that works are behavioral interviews, Bock says, where there’s a consistent set of questions that ask people what they did in specific situations.

Many of the assumptions and practices we have about hiring came about because we didn’t have anything better. For decades, the only (relatively) consistent data point among hires was GPA and test scores. It was an easy way to sort, and because that’s the way it was always done, people stuck with it.

We can do better now. And though Google has something of a head start and a lot more data, more and more companies are catching on. 

The best thing about data? It’s hard for people to contest. Even when people don’t want to believe that they’re underperforming, it’s hard to dispute years worth of numbers. “For most people, just knowing that information causes them to change their conduct,”  Bock says.