Google Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy, "only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees"

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-strategy.html

by danw • 19 years ago

10 10 19 years ago

googleresearch.blogspot.com

It's pretty awesome that Google has invented a magical machine for determining an employee's worth.

danw• 19 years ago

Aye, I'm curious where this magical employee vaule number comes from and how you can tell what it is before they've even worked for google!

schoudha• 19 years ago

You'd be surprised how much you can learn about a person's ability by interviewing people correctly.

antirez• 19 years ago

They analyze fecal excrements with a stick. After few mixes the more it looks like the Google logo the better the employer is. Image matching is performed via a cluster of slaves voting from 0 to 9.

Well... apart from joke, it is a very bad sign when you start to "rate" humans, I think that all this meters at Google are the reason why most of us thing that Apple accomplished good design and beautiful creations. Now thing about Google: Yes, smart engineering but there is some ingredient missing. Sometimes good things come exactly from the guys Google will reject at the first stage of the interview.

budu3• 19 years ago

Do I detect a hint of sarcasm?

gaborcselle• 19 years ago

There are a various underlying assumptions here which aren't necessarily true.

First, it's hard to measure candidate and employee quality on one single scale, with a standard deviation of only 15%.

Second, people you hire aren't always going to perform at the level of performance you estimated, independent of the project you put them on.

Third, your candidate pool won't always contain people who are smarter than the mean. I'm sure Google is now attracting the best and the brightest, but will the same be true 5 years from now?

phil• 19 years ago

Plus the candidate pool is of finite size, and Google has been drinking pretty deeply from it for a long time now.

brianmckenzie• 19 years ago

I find their 'hiring at the company level' the most interesting. Whenever I've hired people in the past it has been on a project or department level, but it does make a lot of sense not to do it that way.

zach• 19 years ago

Come on, Peter, start the axes at zero or at least do us the favor of using a broken axis.

marketer• 19 years ago

Trust me, they don't use the Lake Woebegon stratgey. In Lake Woebegon, "all the women are strong, and all the men are good-looking". I don't want to make any assumptions about the women, but any visit to Google will reveal the men are not very attractive.

Google Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy, "only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees"

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