Google Learns Hiring is About Fit Not Brainteasers and GPAs

Google earned the reputation as one of the more challenging places to interview because of its brainteaser questions used to quiz applicants: name ten things you can do with a pencil besides writing. But no longer. Google has admitted  these questions proved to be useless in predicting who will be a good employee. “We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time,” Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, told the New York Times. “They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart. Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up. “

“Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” 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. 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,” Bock says.

Behavioral interviews are commonplace and used to evaluate a candidate's experiences and behaviors so they can determine the applicant's fit with the company and potential for success.  Fit is determined by behavior, strengths, and character or what is now referred to as soft skills. (I’ve said numerous times I hate this term.) When deliberately and compellingly put together these create a personal story; a brand.  It is this story that needs to be presented in interviews.

GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring

Yeah! I’ve long purported the idea that employers are hiring new professional not students. I’m pleased to read that Google’s data supports this as well. Bock says, “One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.”

Showing your fit in an interview

Back up your words by telling experience-based stories.  Stories serve two critical purposes in the job interview. First, stories are engaging, entertaining, and help position you, not as a job applicant, but as a person who would be great to work with. They allow you to show some personality.

Second, when you talk about yourself in the interview, you want to talk about and demonstrate your behavior and character. The other attributes such as your technical skills, work and school experiences have already been established in your resumé and through the screening process. These attributes are what got you the interview in the first place. More importantly, as you go on in the interview process, your skills, college education and experience don’t differentiate you from the other college students who are interviewing for the position. What will make you stand out are your behaviors and character.