Google is funding “an artificial intelligence for data science”

Google is funding a project called Automatic Statistician that bills itself as “an artificial intelligence for data science,” it announced Tuesday. The project, which comes out of the University of Cambridge and is still in its early stages, aims to automate the selection, building and explanation of machine learning models.

In a nutshell, Automatic Statistician works by looking at a dataset and then determining which type of model would be best for analyzing it as well as which features, or variables, are the strongest. After the model runs, Automatic Statistician will return a text report explaining its findings in plain English — or as close as you can get when dealing with statistics.

 

The project’s homepage quotes Google research scientist Kevin Murphy, who also wrote the blog post announcing Google’s funding for it, explaining the promise of Automatic Statistician like this:

The first problem is that current Machine Learning (ML) methods still require considerable human expertise in devising appropriate features and models. The second problem is that the output of current methods, while accurate, is often hard to understand, which makes it hard to trust. The “automatic statistician” project from Cambridge aims to address both problems, by using Bayesian model selection strategies to automatically choose good models / features, and to interpret the resulting fit in easy-to-understand ways, in terms of human readable, automatically generated reports.

However, Automatic Statistician isn’t the first attempt to deliver this type of service; there have, in fact, been multiple commercial attempts at doing similar things. The most accurate comparison might be to a now-defunct tool by machine learning startup Skytree called Skytree Adviser, which also automatically selected models and generated text reports of its findings. Startups including BeyondCore, Nutonian and even Ayasdi are all promising varying degrees of this functionality, as well.

As sexy as it is to talk about automating the data scientist job, though, it’s a bit early to suggest any software will eliminate the need for such employees any time soon. Even if projects like Automatic Statistician or commercial tools can make it possible for relative laypersons to run machine learning models and uncover patterns, that’s just a step or two down what’s often a much-longer path of turning insights into real value or, possibly, products.

via Google is funding “an artificial intelligence for data science” — Tech News and Analysis.

Google is funding “an artificial intelligence for data science”

(from Google) You don’t know what you don’t know: How our unconscious minds undermine the workplace

When YouTube launched their video upload app for iOS, between 5 and 10 percent of videos uploaded by users were upside-down. Were people shooting videos incorrectly? No. Our early design was the problem. It was designed for right-handed users, but phones are usually rotated 180 degrees when held in left hands. Without realizing it, we’d created an app that worked best for our almost exclusively right-handed developer team.

This is just one example of how unconscious biases influence our actions every day, even when—by definition—we don’t notice them. These biases are shaped by our experiences and by cultural norms, and allow us to filter information and make quick decisions. We’ve evolved to trust our guts. But sometimes these mental shortcuts can lead us astray, especially when they cause us to misjudge people. In the workplace, for example, the halo effect can cause us to inflate performance ratings or in-group bias can lead us to overlook great talent.

Combatting our unconscious biases is hard, because they don’t feel wrong; they feel right. But it’s necessary to fight against bias in order to create a work environment that supports and encourages diverse perspectives and people. Not only is that the right thing to do, but without a diverse workforce, there’s a pretty good chance that our products—just like that early YouTube app—won’t work for everyone. That means we need to make the unconscious, conscious.

The first step is education; we need to help people identify and understand their biases so that they can start to combat them. So we developed a workshop, Unconscious Bias @ Work, in which more than 26,000 Googlers have taken part. And it’s made an impact: Participants were significantly more aware, had greater understanding, and were more motivated to overcome bias.

In addition to our workshop, we’re partnering with organizations like the Clayman Institute and the Ada Initiative to further research and awareness. We’re also taking action to ensure that the decisions we make at work—from promoting employees to marketing products—are objective and fair. Here are four ways we’re working to reduce the influence of bias:

• Gather facts. It’s hard to know you’re improving if you’re not measuring. We collect data on things like gender representation in our doodles and at our conferences.


• Create a structure for making decisions. Define clear criteria to evaluate the merits of each option, and use them consistently. Using the same standards to evaluate all options can reduce bias. This is why we use structured interviews in hiring, applying the same selection and evaluation methods for all.


• Be mindful of subtle cues. Who’s included and who’s excluded? In 2013, Googlers pointed out that of the dozens of conference rooms named after famous scientists, only a few were female. Was this our vision for the future? No. So we changed Ferdinand von Zeppelin to Florence Nightingale—along with many others—to create more balanced representation. Seemingly small changes can have big effects.


• Foster awareness. Hold yourself—and your colleagues—accountable. We’re encouraging Googlers to call out bias. For example, we share a “bias busting checklist” at performance reviews, encouraging managers to examine their own biases and call out those of others.

As we shared back in May, we’re not where we should be when it comes to diversity. But in order to get there, we need to have this conversation. We have to figure out where our biases lie, and we have to combat them. Tackling unconscious bias at work is just one piece of making Google a diverse workplace, but it’s absolutely essential if we’re going to live up to our promise to build technology that makes life better for as many people as possible.

via Official Google Blog: You don’t know what you don’t know: How our unconscious minds undermine the workplace.

(from Google) You don’t know what you don’t know: How our unconscious minds undermine the workplace

How To Get a Job at Google, Facebook or Apple [INFOGRAPHIC]

Jobs at Google, Facebook and Apple are the most sought-after careers in the Silicon Valley. 1 in 4 young professionals want to work at Google, but fewer than 1 in 250 applicants will ever work at the company. Knowing what types of skills and expertise these companies are looking for will somehow give you an idea whether you stand a chance to enjoy the perks that these companies provide to its employees.

In an infographic published by Masters Degree, aspiring applicants may now have an idea on how to land a job at these tech giants. It also highlights the best paying tech jobs, the biggest tech hotspots in the US, the top in demand developer skills, and reveals the current openings. Furthermore, it provides jobseekers tips on what some subjects you can study to help you land a job with one of them. Since Google, Facebook and Apple use recruiters, the infographic also shows how you can better optimize your resume.

With the country still deep in recession, the jobs situation seems to be worsening with each passing day. Americans are seriously hurting, and with through-the-roof unemployment combined with stagnant wages, large-scale economic recovery seems a long ways off. A few industries, however, seem impervious to decline, and tech is one of those industries.

via How To Get a Job at Google, Facebook or Apple [INFOGRAPHIC].

How To Get a Job at Google, Facebook or Apple [INFOGRAPHIC]

Exposing Hidden Bias at Google

Google, like many tech companies, is a man’s world.

Started by a pair of men, its executive team is overwhelmingly male, and its work force is dominated by men. Over all, seven out of 10 people who work at Google are male.

Men make up 83 percent of Google’s engineering employees and 79 percent of its managers. In a report to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last year, Google said that of its 36 executives and top-ranking managers, just three are women.

Google’s leaders say they are unhappy about the firm’s poor gender diversity, and about the severe underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics among its work force.

And so they are undertaking a long-term effort to improve these numbers, the centerpiece of which is a series of workshops aimed at making Google’s culture more accepting of diversity.

There’s just one problem: The company has no solid evidence that the workshops, or many of its other efforts to improve diversity, are actually working.

In some ways Google’s plan to fix its diversity issues resembles many of its most ambitious product ideas, from self-driving cars to wiring the country for superfast Internet.

Photo

Credit Stuart Goldenberg

As in those efforts, it has set a high goal in this case: to fight deep-set cultural biases and an insidious frat-house attitude that pervades the tech business. Tech luminaries make sexist comments so often that it has ceased to be news when they do.

Google is attacking the problem with its considerable resources and creativity. But it does not have a timeline for when the company’s work force might become representative of the population, or whether it will ever get there.

“I think it’s terrific that they’re doing this,” said Freada Kapor Klein, an entrepreneur who has long studied workplace diversity, and who is the co-chairwoman of the Kapor Center for Social Impact. “But it’s going to be important that Google not just give a lecture about the science, but that there be active strategies on how to mitigate bias. A one-shot intervention against a lifetime of biased messages is unlikely to be successful.”

Google says its plan isn’t one-shot. It points out that it has been trying to improve its diversity for years by sponsoring programs to increase the number of women and minorities who go into tech, and meticulously studying the way it hires people in an effort to reduce bias.

In May after pressure from civil rights leaders, the company published a report documenting the sex and race of its employees “to be candid about the issues,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s executive in charge of human resources, wrote at the time.

Google’s disclosure prompted a wave of similar reports across the industry, with Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and other tech giants issuing similarly dismal numbers about their work forces.

Continue reading the main story

A Man’s World

The tech industry has a reputation for being a boys’ club, and recent diversity reports from several companies illustrate how men dominate their global work forces.

 

Company	Total Employees	Pct. Male Employees
Apple	98,000	70%
Facebook	7,200	69%
Google	48,600	70%
Twitter	3,300	70%
Yahoo	12,200	62%

Sources: Company reports, S.E.C. filings

Google’s diversity training workshops, which began last year and which more than half of Google’s nearly 49,000 employees have attended, are based on an emerging field of research in social psychology known as unconscious bias. These are the hidden, reflexive preferences that shape most people’s worldviews, and that can profoundly affect how welcoming and open a workplace is to different people and ideas.

Google’s interest in hidden biases was sparked in 2012, when Mr. Bock read an article in The New York Times about a study that showed systematic discrimination against female applicants for scientific jobs in academia. The effect was so pervasive that researchers theorized the discrimination must be governed by unconscious cultural biases rather than overt sexism.

Mr. Bock wondered how such unconscious biases were playing out at Google. “This is a pretty genteel environment, and you don’t usually see outright manifestations of bias,” he said. “Occasionally you’ll have some idiot do something stupid and hurtful, and I like to fire those people.”

But Mr. Bock suspected that the more pernicious bias was most likely pervasive and hidden, a deep-set part of the culture rather than the work of a few loudmouth sexists.

Improving diversity wasn’t just a feel-good goal for Google. Citing research that shows diverse teams can be more creative than homogeneous ones, Mr. Bock argued that a diverse work force could be good for Google’s business. Could Google investigate how biases were affecting people’s work — and, more important, could it change its own culture?

via Exposing Hidden Bias at Google – NYTimes.com.

Exposing Hidden Bias at Google

Google Course On Unconscious Bias

Here’s What Google Teaches Employees In Its Course On Unconscious Bias

Like almost every other tech company, Google has a diversity problem: 70% of its employees are guys, 61% are white, and only 21% of people in leadership roles are women.

With those unflattering statistics staring them in the face, Google has tried to figure out why the numbers are so skewed toward white dudes.

One conclusion: Unconscious bias, the sometimes useful tendency to make snap judgments (that subway car is empty for a reason), guides us into unexamined bigotry (she’s a woman, not a leader).

Google made as much understandable to its employees with the below video.

Google HR boss Laszlo Bock was tipped to the possibility of unconscious bias at the company when he read a New York Times story about a Yale University study, which concluded that “science professors at American universities widely regard female undergraduates as less competent than male students with the same accomplishments and skills.”

If this could happen to male and female science professors, Google realized it could happen at Google.

“This is a pretty genteel environment, and you don’t usually see outright manifestations of bias,” Bock said. “Occasionally you’ll have some idiot do something stupid and hurtful, and I like to fire those people.”

It wouldn’t just be nice to have greater diversity. It would be good for business, Bock argued, since research shows diverse teams make better decisions.

So Google’s HR department is spearheading a major pro-diversity initiative, and half of Google’s 49,000 employees have already taken the centerpiece workshop.

via Google Course On Unconscious Bias – Business Insider.

Google Course On Unconscious Bias

Google"s 11-Step Guide to Interviewing

Have you read How Google Works yet?

Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Google adviser Jonathan Rosenberg published How Google Works a few weeks ago. It’s full of insights, including a chapter on finding talent and a subsection on interviewing, which they call “the most important skill any business person can develop.” Listed below are 11 tips gleaned from the section on interviewing. Some are Google-specific, but most should be helpful for anyone in any industry. If you haven’t already, check out How Google Works.

1) Do Your Homework:

The main goal of researching a candidate isn’t to search for his “drunken Carnival photo” but to find out why he is interesting. Use the knowledge you’ve acquired to ask specific questions about his previous projects.

“You want to learn if the candidate was the hammer or the egg, someone who caused a change or went along with it.”

2) Find the Limits of the Candidate’s Capabilities:

Schmidt and Rosenberg write that although the interview should not be an “overly stressful” experience, you should ask intellectually challenging questions–questions that are intentionally “large and complex.” Get the candidate to reveal his thought process.

“It’s a good idea to reuse questions across candidates, so you can calibrate responses.”

3) Get the Candidate to Talk About What He Learned

You want to ask questions about the candidate’s background. But avoid asking questions that a candidate could answer by merely regurgitating his experiences. Everyone has a feel-good story to share. Again, the goal should be to get the candidate to reveal his thought process.

“Get her to show off her thinking, not just her resume.”

4) Use Scenario Questions

Scenario questions are questions about crisis management or big decisions. This tip is especially true for senior people because it reveals “how a person will use or trust their own staff.” The idea is to figure out if the candidate collaborates during difficult moments well or not. Is he someone you want to work with during crunch time?

“If the answers you get are cut and pasted from marketing claims, or are simply the reflection of commonly held wisdom, then you have a generic candidate, one who will not be adept at thinking deeply about things.”

5) Ask (some) Brainteasers

Schmidt and Rosenberg admit that Google has phased out brainteasers. Since many of them are posted online, it’s difficult to know if a candidate’s answers emerged in the moment or from memory. However, brain teasers can nonetheless reveal sharp minds from average ones.

“The brainteasers also became a lightning rod for criticism as an elitist tool. To those critics, let us say once and for all: You are right. We want to hire the best minds available.”

6) Develop a Trusted-Interview Program

Interviewers at Google are members of an “elite team of people” who do the bulk of the interviewing. If you want to interview at Google, you must first receive training. Be prepared to get scored on a variety of metrics.

“With this program, interviewing became a privilege, not a chore, and quality increased across the board.”

7) Schedule Interviews for 30 Minutes

This strategy will prevent interviews with candidates who are clearly not a good fit from dragging on. It also reduces small talk and fruitless questions.

“Oftentimes, you walk into an interview and know within minutes that a person is wrong for the company and the job. Who says you have to spend the rest of the hour making useless conversation.”

8) Don’t Interview the Same Candidate More Than 5 Times

Too many interviewers and you run into the problem of diminish returns. Google conducted research and found that after the fourth interview, each additional interview only increased the “decision accuracy” by a mere 1 percent.

“In other words, after four interviews the incremental cost of conducting additional interviews outweighs the value the additional feedback contributes to the ultimate hiring decision.”

9) Measure a Candidate On These Four Categories

Leadership:

We’ll want to know how someone has flexed different muscles in various situations in order to mobilize a team. This can include asserting a leadership role at work or with an organization, or even helping a team succeed when they weren’t officially appointed as the leader.

Role-Related Knowledge:

We… want to make sure that candidates have the experience and the background that will set them up for success in the role. For engineer candidates in particular, we check out coding skills and technical areas of expertise.

General cognitive ability:

We’re less concerned about grades and transcripts and more interested in how a candidate thinks.

Googleyness:

We… want to make sure this is a place they’ll thrive, so we look for signs around their comfort with ambiguity, bias to action, and collaborative nature.

 

10) Hire by Committee; Use a Hiring Packet

If you have a hiring manager, don’t give him the find call. You want to have the people who will work with the candidate and collaborate on the decision. The hiring packet gathers all known information about the candidate. It should provide data and be standardized. That way, you measure the candidate relative to previous ones.

“Stipulate that all packets include statistics on each interviewer’s past scores–including number of interviews, range of scores, and mean–so committee members can factor into their decision-making which interviewers grade higher and which clump their scores in the middle of the bell curve.”

11) Quality Must Be Primary

The golden rule of hiring, according to Schmidt and Rosenberg: “The urgency of the role isn’t sufficiently important to compromise quality in hiring. In the inevitable showdown between speed and quality, quality must prevail.”

 

via Google’s 11-Step Guide to Interviewing | Inc.com.

Google"s 11-Step Guide to Interviewing

Here"s Why You Probably Won"t Get Hired At Google

Google is notorious for being one of the most selective companies out there.

Of the 3 million applications it receives each year, Google only hires 7,000, or about 0.2%, the company’s HR boss Laszlo Bock said at LinkedIn’s recent Talent Conference, according to Quartz.

Although many have heard about Google’s unbelievably difficult brain-teasers, the company actually has a bunch of practices that make its hiring process so selective.

Google keeps its hiring protocol consistent and streamlined so each Googler knows exactly what to look for in candidates, Quartz reports. In order of priority, those include general cognitive ability, leadership, “Googleyness,” and knowledge of the role.

But Google also takes measures to ensure it eliminates bias at all costs. Bock says he reminds his team that most people are terrible interviewers. Many people make lasting impressions based on these encounters that may not accurately represent a candidate’s capabilities.

Google also combats bias by putting a committee in charge of making hiring choices — not hiring managers. Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt also discusses this in a recent book he wrote with Google’s SVP of product Jonathan Rosenberg called “How Google Works.”

Schmidt likens this to the way a university decides which faculty members should get hired or promoted. Essentially, hiring should be peer-based, not hierarchical like the traditional hiring method, he says.

So, those brain-teasers, consistent protocol, and special hiring committee combined make Google nearly impenetrable when it comes to getting hired. In fact, Google’s hiring rate is said to be lower than the acceptance rate at prestigious universities such as Harvard and Yale. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

via Google’s Hiring Process – Business Insider.

Here"s Why You Probably Won"t Get Hired At Google

How Yahoo Hires: Recruiter-In-Chief

If you gave Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer truth serum and asked her about her hiring practices, she’d probably say she’s trying to put Yahoo on par with her former company, Google.

If you gave Yahoo employees truth serum and asked them about Mayer’s hiring practices and HR policies, they’d probably have a few – or perhaps more than a few – complaints.

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.

On July 16, 2012, Mayer was appointed CEO of Yahoo. Since, she has made several changes to the company’s hiring and HR policies, many of which have been controversial, both internally and externally.

Her most-publicized and controversial change was a ban on telecommuting, as many industry insiders claimed that Yahoo employees were abusing the perk. But she also instituted a more rigorous hiring practice that involves her signing off on every hire, gave employees free food and also established an employee-evaluation system that has led to hundreds of employees being fired.

The Changes

One of the first actions Mayer took when she was hired at Yahoo was naming herself “recruiter-in-chief” and made retooling Yahoo’s 12,100 employee-workforce a top priority, according to workforce.com. That included a controversial new hiring process where she signs off on every single hire, an idea she lifted from her former employer, Google.

The hiring practice at Yahoo requires at least four Yahoo employees interviewing each candidate, who each fill out a form, with HR compiling into one master form, according to Business Insider.Once the group has a recommendation, Mayer herself has to sign off on the hire, according to BI.

That move has proven controversial, as Reuters reports that it can take Mayer up to eight weeks to approve a hire. More damningly, Reuters reports that some Yahoo employees alleged Mayer was denying candidates who didn’t have degrees from prestigious universities, a charge Mayer categorically denied.

Along with a new hiring practice, Mayer banned telecommuting for all of her employees in 2013, after the benefit was allegedly being abused by Yahoo employees. The move was met with controversy, with women rights’ activist calling it “disappointing”.

Mayer also instituted a new employee evaluation system that led to more than 600 Yahoo employees being fired in the latter half of 2013 alone, according to allthingsd.com. The website reports that many employees agreed that Yahoo needed to “prune” its workforce, but did not like the way it was handled.

Mayer instituted some more popular programs as well, including extending the maternity time female employees get and giving all employees access to free food and a free smartphone, according to several news reports. According to Business Insider, Mayer also sent an early Saturday morning email to all employees at the beginning of her tenure saying she wants to make Yahoo the “absolute best place to work.”

Bottom Line

Mayer inherited a company in 2012 that, while successful, was lagging behind some of the other tech giants, particularly her old company, Google. There were also wide reports at the time that the company culture at Yahoo was lax and people were taking advantage of certain benefits.

Her new way is more of a top-down approach. Her hiring process, particularly, raises questions, as it essentially makes her the final decision-maker on all hires.

That can lead to biases – or at least the perception of biases – as opposed to a more data-driven approach. It can also lead to an overly-cumbersome hiring practice where strong candidates are getting hired elsewhere before they get an offer from Yahoo.

via How Yahoo Hires: Recruiter-In-Chief – RecruitingBlogs.

How Yahoo Hires: Recruiter-In-Chief

Google’s secret weapon for world domination: Data-based hiring

I have long advocated the use of hard scientific data in hiring as one of the most effective means to drive organisational success. It was a bit of an uphill battle at first. While all CEO’s recognised that the key to a successful business is having the best people, they were not using the best, most predictive methods for identifying the best people. But more and more I see technology meeting psychology in forward-thinking companies. I recently discovered a great article which explored the secret to the hiring success of one of the world’s most successful and innovative firms—Google.

Google has done away with the ages-old subjective decision-making approach in HR which relies on CV reviews and interviews, and replaced it with a highly innovative, data-powered approach it calls “people analytics.” Does it work? Well, considering that each Google employee generates over $1,000,000 in revenue every year, I would think the answer is yes. And given that every company is only as good as its people, I believe that a large part of Google’s extraordinary market success can be attributed to its data-based hiring approach.

The most powerful illustrations of Google’s “People Analytics” approach.

Google has identified the key mechanisms by which they can improve the effectiveness of their employees, here are my top 5 most powerful demonstrations of these:

8 key characteristics of effective managers– Google looked at internal data to identify the 8 key characteristics that are essential for great managers in terms of performance and retention. The key to being a successful leader is providing team members with frequent personalized feedback.

An effective hiring algorithm with only a 1.5% miss rate– Google approaches selection scientifically and has developed an algorithm for predicting which candidates have the highest probability of success. The algorithm analyzed rejected resumes for each large job family in order to identify top candidates who might have been missed. This algorithm found that their initial miss rate was only 1.5%.

What about retention? Google has developed a successful mathematical algorithm to predict which employees are most likely to turn over. This enables leaders to personalise coaching and act before it’s too late.

What about the value of top performers? Google has identified that an exceptional technologist can be as much as 300 times more effective than an average one. By proving the value of top performers, executives can be convinced to provide the resources essential to employing, keeping, and developing talent.

Here’s the data to prove it — Success is not a matter of opinion or qualitative judgment. Analytics teams look to pre-employment assessment and on-the-job metrics to prove it.

By using these methods Google has determined that minimal value was added by an extended interviewing process and was consequently able to dramatically shorten their time to hire.

Every smart business today is metrics-driven. But Google has taken the lead in applying an analytical, metrics-driven approach to the processes of employee hiring and staff development. By their own analysis, a data-based approach to people has generated exceptionally positive business results for them. And hey – if it’s good enough for Google, it probably would work for you too!

via on assessment | Google’s secret weapon for world domination: Data-based hiring.

Google’s secret weapon for world domination: Data-based hiring

Google - Best Companies to Work For 2014

Rank 1

Prev Rank 1

Number of Years on List 8

Industry Media

HQ Location Mountain View, CA

Year Founded 1998

Type of Organization Public

Google’s stock climbed past $1,000 in 2013 — a boon for Googlers, all of whom are stockholders. CEO Larry Page urged them to be “audacious,” especially in philanthropy. Google donates $50 for every five hours an employee volunteers. Last year a new program sent employees to Ghana and India to work on community projects.

Employees

Total US Employees 42162

Total Employees outside the U.S. –

Jobs

New jobs (1 year) 4236

FT Job Growth in the past Year –

% voluntary turnover –

Number of job applicants past 12 months excluding current employees –

Number of Openings (as of 1/2/14) 4000

Pay

Job function or title of largest number of FT salaried employees Software Engineer

Total Compensation for Salaried Position –

Job function or title of largest number of FT hourly employees –

Total Compensation for FT Hourly Position –

Benefits

Offers Fully Paid Sabbaticals No

Offers Onsite Childcare No

Health

Pays for 100% of Healthcare Costs No

Offers onsite fitness centers Yes

Subsidizes Offsite Gym Memberships Yes

Work-Life

Offers job sharing No

Offers compressed work weeks No

Diversity

% Minorities –

% Women –

Training

Hours/Year

Average hours of training per year that regular FT salaried employees receive –

Average hours of training per year that regular FT hourly employees receive –

via Google – Best Companies to Work For 2014 – Fortune.

Google - Best Companies to Work For 2014

An inside look at Google’s data-driven job interview process

If you interview for a job at Google, don’t expect the person making the hiring decision to be your prospective boss.

When it comes to evaluating job candidates, “what we’ve found is you’re much more objective if you understand the space but do not necessarily have a stake in that person actually joining,” said Sunil Chandra, Google’s vice president for staffing and operations.

And that’s why Google, the Silicon Valley giant known for its attractive workplace benefits and whimsical office culture, uses panels of varied employees — not potential direct supervisors or peers — to handle its worker selection process.

First, a small group of staffers interviews the candidates. Then a second committee reviews all materials about the applicants, including those they submitted on their own behalf as well as interviewer feedback.

“That comes from the thesis of removing any kind of trace of subjectivity,” Chandra said.

As with so many aspects of its human resources operations, Google’s job candidate interview methods are heavily data-driven. The firm recently generated buzz in the talent industry when it said it had done away with the notorious brain teaser component of its interviews after statistics showed the ability to ace them had no correlation with success at the company.

But that’s not the only way analytics have shaped the process. Google used to conduct many interviews before settling on a job candidate and making an offer. But through analytics, the company has determined that after four interviews, they don’t achieve a much greater degree of confidence about whether the interviewee is a good fit for a position. As a result, they’ve capped the number of interviews that they’ll put a candidate through.

Data also have led Google to conclude that speed is of the essence when it comes to hiring recent graduates.

“When we’re on campus, we’ve found over the years of analysis there actually is an inflection point in terms of the length of time you take to make an offer and students’ availability,” Chandra said.

So for these roles, they might move faster to fill the job than they would for a more senior position, Chandra said. On average, Google takes about 45 days to hire.

While science is deeply embedded in Google’s hiring protocol, Chandra said there’s one aspect that remains a bit of an art: Determining an individual’s “Googliness,” the company’s term for how well someone will fit into its workplace culture.

To understand someone’s “Googliness,” Chandra said they’re looking to figure out, “Are you innately curious? Are you someone that just wants to know more about stuff? Are you someone that likes working in teams and likes getting people together?”

That Google uses hiring panels to interview new workers means that a broad swath of its workforce must be trained in how to question job candidates.

“Hiring is pretty much part of everyone’s job, it’s part of everyone’s DNA,” Chandra said.

That’s why sometimes a job candidate will face a fifth interviewer for a position at Google, even though the company’s data show four interviews is the sweet spot. That fifth person is a “shadow interviewer” who is simply training to conduct interviews for future job seekers, and that person’s analysis isn’t included in the decision-making process.

For all of the emphasis on efficiency in Google’s job interview procedures, its initial applicant screening process seems to focus more on thoroughness.

The company receives a deluge of Web applications each year from 2 million to 3 million people, a figure that does not include the legions of other candidates Google identifies through referrals, career fairs and other sources.

It’s easy to imagine that amid a volume that crushing, many applicants might get skipped over or forgotten. But Google says that’s not the case.

“We’re really concerned about false positives and false negatives, so we spend a lot of time reviewing pretty much every application we get,” Chandra said.

To make sure they don’t miss out on top talent, Google employs a team of full-time screeners to sift through applications. The company would not say how many people are employed in these roles, but it said the group is “sizeable.”

 

An inside look at Google’s data-driven job interview process – The Washington Post.

An inside look at Google’s data-driven job interview process

Google had one hour to make counter offers to prevent Facebook poaching talent

Google instigated a policy in 2007 that saw the search giant make generous counter-offers to employees being courted by rival Facebook within one hour, court documents show.

The policy was revealed by a leaked Eric Schmidt email, who was Google’s chief executive at the time. It was put into force in November 2007 by Schmidt in an attempt to prevent the rapidly growing Facebook from stealing personnel.

Facebook had just raised $240m from Microsoft at the time, shunning investment from Google.

The policy was described as “disturbing” by Vijay Gill, a manager within Google’s key engineering organisation. Gill questioned the policy saying it “appears to contravene our equal pay for equal performance policy” and that “it appears to reward folks applying to Facebook”, as reported by Quartz.

At the time, Schmidt confirmed the policy and said that Google “should be embarrassed and disgusted by the leak”.

Tech talent fight

Facebook was not included in the no-hiring pact that existed between the big Silicon Valley tech companies, including Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe. The war with Facebook for software engineering talent was so fierce that Google considered having its cofounders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, personally court Facebook workers.

The documents detailing the internal dealings were released as part of the $3bn case sought by technology workers against Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe. The four technology companies are accused of conspiring to fix wages and not recruit other’s technology talent by 64,000 tech workers.

Google and Apple have offered a settlement of $324m, which has yet to approved by US District Judge Lucy Koh who is presiding over the case.

Google declined to comment on the ongoing court case.

Google had one hour to make counter offers to prevent Facebook poaching talent

17 Ridiculous Questions Google Has Stopped Asking During Interviews

Sometimes the hiring practices of even the biggest and most successful companies can be outright ridiculous.

There can be bizarre interview questions that seemingly have no answers. There can be standards — like not hiring anyone who attended a college outside of the Ivy League — that will knock candidates out of the race before they even approach the starting line.

Google used to be the shining example of these practices. It had high standards and asked silly questions.

The questions were so nuts that they were eventually banned from being asked. That’s right, banned.

In 2009, Seattle job coach Lewis Lin put together a list of 140 questions his clients were asked by Google. We’ve picked out some of the wildest and added a link to the whole list at the end.

Future Google employees should be grateful these questions are no longer on the table.

1. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

2. Why are manhole covers round?

3. You need to check that your friend Bob has your correct phone number, but you cannot ask him directly …

You must write the question on a card and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure that Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number?

4. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

5. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife …

Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?

6. A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

7. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

8. How many vacuums are made per year in USA?

9. Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.

10. Explain the significance of “dead beef.”

11. If a person dials a sequence of numbers on the telephone, what possible words/strings can be formed from the letters associated with those numbers?

12. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

13. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

14. You have two eggs and get access to a 100-story building …

Eggs can be very hard or very fragile, which means they may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break two eggs in the process.

15. You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?

16. You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present (including you and the friend) …

Your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find who has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds who does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. Would you accept the wager?

17. Explain a database in three sentences to your 8-year-old nephew.

 

17 Ridiculous Questions Google Has Stopped Asking During Interviews | Entrepreneur.com.

17 Ridiculous Questions Google Has Stopped Asking During Interviews

Google Steps up Efforts for More Racial Diversity

Google has had more trouble diversifying its workforce than its computer scientists have had writing programs that respond to search requests in the blink of an eye or designing cars that can navigate traffic without a human behind the wheel.

That seemed to be the conclusion when the Silicon Valley giant this week issued a gender and ethnic breakdown of its workforce that showed that of its 26,600 U.S. employees, 61 percent are white, 30 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic and 2 percent black. Thirty percent of its employees are women.

“Google is miles from where we want to be,” said Laszlo Bock, head of personnel at Google.

Why is one of the most innovative, dynamic sectors of the U.S. economy looking like the corporate world of the past, at least when it comes to blacks, Hispanics and women?

The biggest factor is a shortage of such students majoring in computer science or other technical fields in college, according to Bock.

“There is an absolute pipeline problem,” he said in an interview Wednesday with “PBS Newshour.”

One year, Google says, there were just two black people in the U.S. with newly minted doctorates in computer science on the job market. The company hired one of them, and Microsoft hired the other, according to Bock.

But the educational choices of some minorities don’t entirely account for the lack of diversity at technology companies.

For instance, Google sells $50 billion in advertising annually, a task that required more than 2,900 salespeople in the U.S. as of last August. Just 79 of them, or 3 percent, were black. A total of 127, or 4 percent, were Hispanic. More than 2,000, or about 70 percent, were white.

Google attributes this phenomenon to “unconscious biases” that have historically favored white people. “We like people who are like us, who watch the same shows, who like the same food, who have the same backgrounds,” Bock told PBS.

To address this issue, Google has put more than 20,000 employees through 90-minute training sessions during the past year to help them become more aware of their biases.

Google is also trying to do more recruiting at colleges with large minority enrollments. During the past year, Google has dispatched a specialist to work with historically black Howard University to draw up a curriculum that will give its graduates a better chance of competing for technology jobs against the likes of MIT. The program will be extended to five other colleges this fall.

Google is just one of many high-tech companies that are pledging to diversify their workforces this spring under pressure from the Rev. Jesse Jackson. But the same promises were made in the Silicon Valley 15 years ago, again under pressure from the civil rights leader. That effort included a conference, a new website, commitments from top firms, and a call to educate and employ 200,000 young people.

“I’m disappointed. For the most part they have not improved,” said Jackson on Thursday. “Look at their board of directors and their c-suites. There’s a culture of exclusion.”

Google’s efforts come amid a renewed bout of advocacy from Jackson and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, which have been leading delegations to shareholder meetings this spring at such companies as Google, Facebook, eBay and Hewlett-Packard, decrying “old patterns that exclude people of color and women from opportunity and advancement.”

Jackson said that he hopes others will follow Google’s lead, and that this time he is redoubling his efforts here.

In 1999, when Jackson launched his first Silicon Valley initiative, 89 percent of Silicon Valley chairmen and CEOs were white, while the white-collar workforce was about 60 percent white and 31 percent Asian. Those figures have barely budged.

Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and Advanced Micro Devices have published similar labor data breakdowns.

Four percent of the 57,000 U.S. employees at computer chip maker Intel Corp. are black, according to the company’s breakdown. About 8 percent of Intel’s U.S. workers are Hispanic and 26 percent are women.

“We are not satisfied with our diversity data, and we continuously strive to improve,” said Patricia McDonald, the company’s vice president of human resources. The company also says it has invested more than $1 billion worldwide during the last decade to improve education.

Intel also recently promoted a woman, Renee James, to president.

Hewlett-Packard Co. has won praise for hiring two different women, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, as CEO since 1999. Overall, one-third of HP’s U.S. staff are women, according to the company’s most recent statistics; 7 percent of HP’s U.S. workers are black and 6 percent are Hispanic.

Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, an organization focused on the local economy and quality of life, said one problem is that the sector moves swiftly.

“Silicon Valley moves at a pace that is unbelievable. It is a breakneck marketplace. So when you’re adding people, you don’t take time to cast a wider net,” he said.

Sharon Vosmek, CEO of nonprofit Astia, which connects women-led startups with financial backers, said: “This is not a Google issue; this is a societal issue.”

“Are there subtle biases? Yes, but they exist in society. Men get together and play golf, have a beer,” she said. “We’re up against societal norms, and we have to break those down by simply supporting networking between genders.”

via Google Steps up Efforts for More Racial Diversity – ABC News.

Google Steps up Efforts for More Racial Diversity

Is Working At Google Actually Terrible For Your Career?

“Then it is f***ing Monday again and you have to do what it is that you do”: that’s David H. Hansson, the cofounder of the 37Signals and creator of the Ruby on Rails programming language. The author-entrepreneur-programmer told This Week In Startups that he’s in the “epicenter of happiness,” since he gets to do the work he wants to do with the people he wants to work with. This, he explains, is why he’d never want 37Signals to sell out or get acquired: “Would I give all that up for somebody to give me a lot of money and then like (say) ‘Oh. Now you have to work in the bowels of Google or whatever?’”

Thing is, those bowels are pretty dang prestigious: we all study Google and their perks. The search giant gets mentioned in the same breath as Goldman Sachs as a destination for bright young world-conquerers. And we try to train ourselves in such a way that we, yes we, may one day land a gig at the Googleplex.

So when we read this Quora thread about the worst parts of working at Googleplex, it hit us in the solar plexus. Understandably, many of the testimonials are anonymous–so we’ll advise taking them with a grain of salt–but the thread is illuminating in the way it re-romanticizes the dream job.

The problems include:

There’s way too many insanely qualified people there.

Since every body is hyper-educated, you’ll find high-level grads “providing tech support for Google’s ads products, or manually taking down flagged content from YouTube, or writing basic code to A|B test the color of a button on a site.”

It’s tough to get promoted

Since everybody below, beside, and above you has the same ridiculous education and hardcore work ethic. And if the work doesn’t let you show yourself to be exceptional, you won’t be able to show that you are.

You don’t get to do individual, standout work

Google has 30,000 of the world’s brightest people, which is amazing in and of itself, but makes it difficult to find the opportunity to do your own work. As one user says:

“I habitually describe my time working as an AdWords monkey as being like a janitor at the UN. You know that theoretically great world changing things are going on in the building, but all you ever really see is shit.”

You’ll get malaise-y

User Vlad Patryshev, who left Google and uses his name, says that a strange internal-external dynamic begins to take shape: a combination of “constant professional boredom and intellectual malaise” that gets sugar-coated by “constant awe on the part of people you meet outside Google who want to know all about the perks, the culture, and the interview without ever really asking about the work.”

And you won’t be growing as fast

The Google name is super presitigous and awesome and amazing and everything, but as Stephen Cohen, co-founder of Palantir told a Stanford class on startups, the cushion comes at the expense of your personal development:

We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall. So, run your prospective engineering hires through that narrative. Then show them the alternative: working at your startup.

via Is Working At Google Actually Terrible For Your Career? | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

Is Working At Google Actually Terrible For Your Career?

How Google Uses Data to Build a Better Worker

“I have charts and graphs to back me up. So **** off.”

Not the mantra you’d expect from your typical human resources representative. But every new hire for Google’s People Analytics department, part of the company’s HR function (which it calls People Operations), gets a laptop sticker emblazoned with this slogan. More than just an attention getter, it succinctly captures the profound difference in how Google addresses all matters related to people. Googlers maintain a firm belief that insights from data can systematically improve performance and leadership within the company’s ever-growing empire.

While the rest of the world is waking up to analytics and the power of Big Data, Google has spent years methodically building one of the most refined performance-management engines in the corporate world.  Similar to any of the company’s other departments, every People Operations project starts with a question to answer. Google’s People Analytics team has posed questions that range from tactical issues (“What if we could decrease ramp-up time for new employees by a month?”) to the existential (“What if all engineers were able to reach their potential for innovation?”) to the seemingly outlandish (“What if working at Google increased your life span by a year?”). The questions lie at the heart of solving fundamental business problems related to managing the employee life cycle, maximizing employee’s potential contribution, or improving Googlers’ wellness.

The impetus for the company’s data-based approach to the generally subjective domain of people decisions came from Laszlo Bock, Google’s SVP of People Operations. Bock, who joined the company in 2006 after stints with GE and McKinsey, found a like-minded ally when he hired Prasad Setty to run the company’s analytics department.  At first glance, Setty is an unexpected HR leader with his chemical engineering degree and quick admission that he found the softer courses in his MBA curriculum frustrating because people decisions tend to invite temperamental, emotional and subjective choices. Bock challenged Setty to bring the same rigor to people decisions that Google applied to its engineering analysis.

Recalling how Google once tested forty-two different color shades for the Google toolbar to determine which hue optimized click-through rates, Bock put a stake in the ground that has since differentiated Google’s approach. As Setty recalled during our interview, Bock said plainly, “We need to be able to measure, to find out what does and doesn’t work at Google rather than just adopt best practices.”

Better-Than-Human Relations 

Over the past six years, Setty has built his People Analytics department into the company’s mainframe. While Google won’t disclose its exact size, estimates are that Setty has dozens of employees including PhDs, hardcore technologists and ex-consultants. As Setty told us, “the combined power of the group is having the business people make sure we’re solving the right problems, the stats folks ensure there’ s rigor in how we do it and the technologists who make the solutions scalable and transparent.”

The goal of People Analytics is to “complement human decision makers, not replace them.”

Tackling Bock’s challenge, the team’s mission statement is for “all people decisions at Google to be based on data and analytics.” While many companies seek to make data-based talent decisions, Google deploys the kind of rigorous, scientific testing and statistical analysis that is more common in university labs. Running real experiments, according to Setty, helps describe “a small but significant percentage of the variance in human behavior.”

But Setty and his team learned early on while working on a project for Google’s engineering department that leaders didn’t want algorithms to replace human judgment. Rather than entrust important talent decisions to black-box calculations, Google’s leaders asked Setty to focus on providing insights that could help decision-makers improve the odds of getting complex decisions right. As Setty explained, the models that result from his department’s experiments explain normal or “average contexts” that won’t apply universally. The goal of People Analytics is to “complement human decision makers, not replace them.”

What Google Learned

Attracting, retaining and developing talent at Google is serious business, as the analytic team has demonstrated that exceptional technologists can have a performance differential of up to three hundred times an average employee.  Over the last half-dozen years, Setty’s team has produced significant insights that have:

• helped limit the number of interviews required (company analysis showed that more than four interviewers didn’t lead to higher quality hiring),


• revealed the optimal organizational size and shape of various departments,


• shown how to better manage maternity leave resulting in a fifty percent reduction in defections,


• created on-boarding agenda for an employee’s first four days of work that boosted productivity by up to 15 percent


• and produced an algorithm to review rejected applications (Google gets over two million applications every year) that has helped the company hire some talented engineers its screening process would have otherwise missed.

While the company keeps much of its analysis confidential, one of the high profile cases it shared was dubbed “Project Oxygen.” First reported in the New York Times, as an “8-point plan to help managers improve,” the list of leadership characteristics indicative of Google’s high performers is less remarkable than how the analysis by Setty’s team has since influenced people policies and processes at the company. Even Bock was initially unimpressed when he saw the list, which included management altruisms such as “have a clear vision” or “help your employees with career development.”

But Bock’s imperative to make people issues data-based was prescient and, for the first time, the study created belief among Google’s highly technical employee base that leadership actually makes a difference in their world. (In its early days, Google famously eliminated all management positions declaring them unnecessary. The failed experiment didn’t last long.)

Since then, the analytics team has worked with other parts of People Operations and the business leaders to make the eight leadership behaviors the basis for twice annual manager feedback surveys; they’re probed further in the annual organization survey and are the criteria for the “Great Manager Award.” Winners who are named great managers share a weeklong trip with their significant other and Google senior leaders. Rather than award cash or prizes, Setty says Google gives employees what they want most – time and exposure to other leaders. Setty explains that analysis of the company’s annual survey, Googlegeist, demonstrates that Googlers prize opportunities to exchange ideas with senior leaders, and this interaction can have more of an impact on career satisfaction than the pace of their promotions.

Where Does High Performance Come From?

Setty’s team is far from finished and has continued to expand its scope. The next big project will focus on what makes a high-performing team at Google. The fundamental questions the company is trying to answer include the ideal number and type of people on a team and how team dynamics impact output. These aren’t new questions, and there’s decades of academic literature that Setty’s team will reference in its analysis. What makes Google’s approach so different is that it’s unwilling to stop there and simply rely on past research, conventional wisdom or industry best practice. The team is looking for unique insight into how these factors predict success at Google.

Ultimately, Setty’s team is looked upon as a valued business partner because it brings hard data that can help leaders better manage the human dynamic. And it’s not simply about productivity, but also about keeping the unique aspects of Google’s culture that makes it such a desirable place to work.  After all, as Setty’s team has proven, when employees are happier they perform better and stay longer.

via How Google Uses Data to Build a Better Worker – Chris DeRose – The Atlantic.

How Google Uses Data to Build a Better Worker

A Google Recruiter’s Advice: How to Get My Attention via Email

Recruiters and hiring managers get tens, if not hundreds, of applications for every job opening. If you don’t want your email to get lost among the pile of applications in a recruiter’s inbox, you may need a new strategy.

In a recent interview with SavvySugar, Michael Junge, Google recruiter and author of Purple Squirrel, gives simple but impactful pointers on writing the ideal introduction email…

Be Specific

Junge says he’s more likely to click on an email that’s specific versus one that’s generic. It’s helpful to make sure that even the subject line is specific to the purpose of an email so the intention of the email is clear.

“Instead of a generic subject line, I recommend something that references the specific job title,” Junge says. For example, using a subject line like “Expert Project Manager for Position Number 428″ will make the receiver more likely to open it versus a generic “Hi, Nice to Meet You.”

Make It Brief

Short and sweet is always the better route to take when you’re writing emails, and a great introduction email is going to make a difference, according to Junge. “The idea of the email is mostly to get the person to click on the resume,” says the Google recruiter. A good email should say something like, “Hey my name is so and so, it’s nice to meet you. I’m a project manager with 10 years of experience. Here are a couple of quick highlights of my background.”

Junge recommends to then add two or three bullet points that are relevant to the particular position based on the information the applicants have about the job.

Your intro email can be brief… in fact, should be brief! Think of it this way: what does the recruiter need to know about you, and why should they keep reading?

 

via A Google Recruiter’s Advice: How to Get My Attention via Email | The Savvy Intern by YouTern.

A Google Recruiter’s Advice: How to Get My Attention via Email

How Google Uses Data to Build a Better Worker

“I have charts and graphs to back me up. So f*** off.”

Not the mantra you’d expect from your typical human resources representative. But every new hire for Google’s People Analytics department, part of the company’s HR function (which it calls People Operations), gets a laptop sticker emblazoned with this slogan. More than just an attention getter, it succinctly captures the profound difference in how Google addresses all matters related to people. Googlers maintain a firm belief that insights from data can systematically improve performance and leadership within the company’s ever-growing empire.

While the rest of the world is waking up to analytics and the power of Big Data, Google has spent years methodically building one of the most refined performance-management engines in the corporate world.  Similar to any of the company’s other departments, every People Operations project starts with a question to answer. Google’s People Analytics team has posed questions that range from tactical issues (“What if we could decrease ramp-up time for new employees by a month?”) to the existential (“What if all engineers were able to reach their potential for innovation?”) to the seemingly outlandish (“What if working at Google increased your life span by a year?”). The questions lie at the heart of solving fundamental business problems related to managing the employee life cycle, maximizing employee’s potential contribution, or improving Googlers’ wellness.

The impetus for the company’s data-based approach to the generally subjective domain of people decisions came from Laszlo Bock, Google’s SVP of People Operations. Bock, who joined the company in 2006 after stints with GE and McKinsey, found a like-minded ally when he hired Prasad Setty to run the company’s analytics department.  At first glance, Setty is an unexpected HR leader with his chemical engineering degree and quick admission that he found the softer courses in his MBA curriculum frustrating because people decisions tend to invite temperamental, emotional and subjective choices. Bock challenged Setty to bring the same rigor to people decisions that Google applied to its engineering analysis.

Recalling how Google once tested forty-two different color shades for the Google toolbar to determine which hue optimized click-through rates, Bock put a stake in the ground that has since differentiated Google’s approach. As Setty recalled during our interview, Bock said plainly, “We need to be able to measure, to find out what does and doesn’t work at Google rather than just adopt best practices.”

Better-Than-Human Relations 

Over the past six years, Setty has built his People Analytics department into the company’s mainframe. While Google won’t disclose its exact size, estimates are that Setty has dozens of employees including PhDs, hardcore technologists and ex-consultants. As Setty told us, “the combined power of the group is having the business people make sure we’re solving the right problems, the stats folks ensure there’ s rigor in how we do it and the technologists who make the solutions scalable and transparent.”

Tackling Bock’s challenge, the team’s mission statement is for “all people decisions at Google to be based on data and analytics.” While many companies seek to make data-based talent decisions, Google deploys the kind of rigorous, scientific testing and statistical analysis that is more common in university labs. Running real experiments, according to Setty, helps describe “a small but significant percentage of the variance in human behavior.”

But Setty and his team learned early on while working on a project for Google’s engineering department that leaders didn’t want algorithms to replace human judgment. Rather than entrust important talent decisions to black-box calculations, Google’s leaders asked Setty to focus on providing insights that could help decision-makers improve the odds of getting complex decisions right. As Setty explained, the models that result from his department’s experiments explain normal or “average contexts” that won’t apply universally. The goal of People Analytics is to “complement human decision makers, not replace them.”

What Google Learned

Attracting, retaining and developing talent at Google is serious business, as the analytic team has demonstrated that exceptional technologists can have a performance differential of up to three hundred times an average employee.  Over the last half-dozen years, Setty’s team has produced significant insights that have:

• helped limit the number of interviews required (company analysis showed that more than four interviewers didn’t lead to higher quality hiring),


• revealed the optimal organizational size and shape of various departments,


• shown how to better manage maternity leave resulting in a fifty percent reduction in defections,


• created on-boarding agenda for an employee’s first four days of work that boosted productivity by up to 15 percent


• and produced an algorithm to review rejected applications (Google gets over two million applications every year) that has helped the company hire some talented engineers its screening process would have otherwise missed.

While the company keeps much of its analysis confidential, one of the high profile cases it shared was dubbed “Project Oxygen.” First reported in the New York Times, as an “8-point plan to help managers improve,” the list of leadership characteristics indicative of Google’s high performers is less remarkable than how the analysis by Setty’s team has since influenced people policies and processes at the company. Even Bock was initially unimpressed when he saw the list, which included management altruisms such as “have a clear vision” or “help your employees with career development.”

But Bock’s imperative to make people issues data-based was prescient and, for the first time, the study created belief among Google’s highly technical employee base that leadership actually makes a difference in their world. (In its early days, Google famously eliminated all management positions declaring them unnecessary. The failed experiment didn’t last long.)

Since then, the analytics team has worked with other parts of People Operations and the business leaders to make the eight leadership behaviors the basis for twice annual manager feedback surveys; they’re probed further in the annual organization survey and are the criteria for the “Great Manager Award.” Winners who are named great managers share a weeklong trip with their significant other and Google senior leaders. Rather than award cash or prizes, Setty says Google gives employees what they want most – time and exposure to other leaders. Setty explains that analysis of the company’s annual survey, Googlegeist, demonstrates that Googlers prize opportunities to exchange ideas with senior leaders, and this interaction can have more of an impact on career satisfaction than the pace of their promotions.

Where Does High Performance Come From?

Setty’s team is far from finished and has continued to expand its scope. The next big project will focus on what makes a high-performing team at Google. The fundamental questions the company is trying to answer include the ideal number and type of people on a team and how team dynamics impact output. These aren’t new questions, and there’s decades of academic literature that Setty’s team will reference in its analysis. What makes Google’s approach so different is that it’s unwilling to stop there and simply rely on past research, conventional wisdom or industry best practice. The team is looking for unique insight into how these factors predict success at Google.

Ultimately, Setty’s team is looked upon as a valued business partner because it brings hard data that can help leaders better manage the human dynamic. And it’s not simply about productivity, but also about keeping the unique aspects of Google’s culture that makes it such a desirable place to work.  After all, as Setty’s team has proven, when employees are happier they perform better and stay longer.

via How Google Uses Data to Build a Better Worker – Atlantic Mobile.

How Google Uses Data to Build a Better Worker