Hiring The Right Talent — Five Tips from “How Google Works”
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1.0 SPEND YOUR TIME
Hiring plays a pivotal role in building a sustainable business and brand. It should be a critical part of your business strategy.
In most companies, senior executives don’t spend much time in the hiring process. They leave it to managers and come only at the end of the process to approve the decision. Imagine a sports team — What do you think is the fundamental function of senior executives, coaches, and the captain? — Hiring and retaining the best talent. If a company wants to build a high-performance team, the leadership team has to spend time interviewing candidates.
At Google, whether hiring an entry-level software engineer or a senior executive, the company’s leaders spend considerable time interviewing everyone, and also with the same level of intensity.
2.0 HIERARCHICAL OR PEER-BASED HIRING
Most companies follow a traditional hierarchy-based hiring process where a manager takes all the hiring decisions for his unit, and the senior executives ratify the hires at the end. However, the new hire will have to work with people from other teams or departments. So, a single person’s poor hiring decision would directly impact several people. Moreover, a manager’s natural bias could get in the way of hiring people smarter than him. It would affect the company’s growth.
The solution — At Google, hiring is peer-based, not hierarchical. The company follows the academic model of hiring. Universities spend a considerable amount of time in the hiring process because they don’t fire professors. The Candidate selection is done through committees.
Google pushes the hiring decision to people who might be working with the potential hire. Following the academic model, the company forms a committee of employees for the interviewing process. It is a diverse team of high performers with differences in thought, geography, and field of knowledge.
