Interview from Art to Science: A Recruiter’s Guide
What we can learn from Google’s approach to the job interview
Laszlo Bock, the Head of People Operations at Google, writes in his book Work Rules! Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead that people often approach the job interview and hiring in the same way that Garrison Keillor describes the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, a place where “all the children are above average.”
Laszlo comments that hiring is something we all think we are great at, but “we never go back to check if we are, and so we never get better.”
We always think we are all above average at interviewing…but when do we really check that assumption?
Why do we all think we are great at hiring?
Often we don’t have the proper systems in place to create an objective and repeatable hiring process, from sourcing to interviewing. As managers, we also fail to implement adequate monitoring and feedback mechanisms in order to track the effectiveness of our hires, accounting for myriad factors such as technical prowess, culture fit, ability to work as a team player, and a variety of other things.
Google is a global leader of utilizing data and technology to drive human decision making.
In order to understand how we as Hiring Managers can begin to think about hiring as less of an art-form and more of a data-driven science, let’s take a look at the evolution of the hiring process at Google over time.
Evolution of Quality Control
Google began by hiring people solely for IQ because they wanted to find smart people regardless of their work experience. Google would ask for transcripts, standardized test scores, and would also use brain teasers as a way of measuring intelligence.
Unfortunately, Google discovered that brain teasers (such as “How many cows could fit in Kenya”) are not predictive of job performance.
Now, Google uses a balanced approach that includes looking at academic qualifications, using interview questions that will test for intelligence, creativity, problem solving, and more. The interview should be a composite of testing for a variety of traits, rather than one dimension.
Structuring of Interview Format
Google also began with a somewhat random interviewing technique, and interviewers often forgot what questions to ask, wasting candidate time and creating many unnecessary interviews.
Google replaced this ad-hoc system with a structured pipeline of interviews, with a set rubric of questions, often excluding direct managers from hiring decisions and giving one person the final say in all hiring decision making.
A standardized rubric cuts out the ability for an interviewer to be swayed by implicit biases (aka. “first impressions”). Choosing one person to be the decision maker about who to hire is in order to maintain non-diluted standards. Direct managers can be incentivized by the wrong things ie. “hiring someone quickly because we needed them yesterday!”
Technology-driven improvement of hiring process
When Google had finally mastered a structured interview process on the human level, it applied technology to automatically review and make improvements on the process.
This technology is totally data-driven internal software that conducts small experiments run internally to measure outcomes in retention, managing and maintaining company culture, and an effective hiring algorithm.
What Can I Do If I Don’t Have Google’s Resources?
In bad news, as a hiring manager at a company that is likely not have surpassed Apple in 2016 as the most valuable company in the world, you might not be able to dedicate an entire internal team to build you this internal software.
…In good news, you are also not expected to hire 1,000+ people every year.
As hiring managers, there is still much we can learn from the experiments that Google has conducted to make better hiring decisions, specifically in how Google structures and reflects on its processes.
1- Be so specific about what you are looking for in your job opening that you could delegate the candidate interview and selection to someone else.
Think about the day to day of the job opening so specifically that there is no room for guesswork. Answer questions like
- The types of scenarios the candidate will handle
- What red flags would prevent this candidate from being eligible
- What type of academic history is required of the candidate
- What personality traits should the candidate most strongly demonstrate
2- Implement systems before and after someone is hired to ensure you are constantly improving your interviewing process.
When conducting the interviews and testing candidates, make sure to have a systematic process.
Review:
- Which questions or tests am I using to assess each skill?
- What is the ideal answer I am looking for?
- What would cause a candidate to fail this question or test?
After you have hired a candidate, ensure you have a systematic process in place that directly correlates with your pre-hiring rubric that you use to evaluate their on the job performance. This way, you can cross-check your assumptions about the candidate vs. reality, and use this data to go back and make improvements to your interviewing and testing process.
If you think you need help getting started with this data-driven approach to hiring, we have created a free and simple tool that you can use as the backbone of your systematic interview approach.
3- Think outside the box about how to find the best talent for your position
Hiring Managers should be the ones championing innovation in how hiring is conducted. This doesn’t need to be a hard, time consuming puzzle.
One of the best things to do might be to look at the current process your team follows when there is a job opening. Think about the tough roles for which you received the largest or smallest number of qualified candidates. Check to see if there were any differences in how you approached advertising this role such as job title, job description formatting, tapping referral networks etc.
You do not necessarily need to advertise on a billboard, but crazy experiments never hurt as long as you learn from them.
Happy Hiring!
If you have job openings that you would like to recruit for with Duma Works, please visit our website or call Allan from our Recruitment Team on +254 713 032 796.
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Posted in Recruiting & Leadership Tags: africa, helpful interview practices, interview tips, Kenya, nairobi, Recruiting, Recruiting Tips
Originally published at dumaworks.com on May 3, 2016.
