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. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?Ī. These are fundamental things that turn out to be really important in making people feel excited and happy and wanting to go the extra mile for you. Some of them are very straightforward - the manager treats me with respect, the manager gives me clear goals, the manager shares information, the manager treats the entire team fairly. What are some things that the managers are ranked on?Ī. And that in itself causes them to change their behavior. One of the applications of Big Data is giving people the facts, and getting them to understand that their own decision-making is not perfect. Because for most people, just knowing that information causes them to change their conduct. You don’t actually have to do that much more. But these are the facts that people are reporting about how they experience you.” This is what people say.” They might say, “Well, you know, I’m actually better than that.” And then I’ll say, “That’s how you feel. If you go back to somebody and say, “Look, you’re an eighth-percentile people manager at Google. We’ve actually made it harder to be a bad manager. Over the last three years, we’ve significantly improved the quality of people management at Google, measured by how happy people are with their managers. We then share that with the manager, and we track improvement across the whole company. We collect data for everyone in the company who’s a manager on how well they’re doing on anywhere between 12 and 18 different factors. Twice a year, anybody who has a manager is surveyed on the manager’s qualities. Is it because of the type of people? Is it because of the number of people? Is it because of how they work together? Is there something in the dynamic? We don’t know what we’re going to discover.Ī. So we’re trying to figure out which teams perform well and which don’t. We’re also observing people working together in different groups and have found that the average team size of any group at Google is about six people. On the leadership side, we’re looking at what makes people successful leaders and how can we cultivate that. We’ve done some interesting things to figure out how many job candidates we should be interviewing for each position, who are better interviewers than others and what kind of attributes tend to predict success at Google. The lesson for anyone looking at this space is that you need to construct this really powerful tent of trust in the people gathering the data and how they use it.
Typically, we give people an option to participate in anything either confidentially or anonymously. I have to preface the answer by saying that when we look at any data related to our people, we treat the data with great respect. What else has Google done in this field?Ī. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. Part of the challenge with leadership is that it’s very driven by gut instinct in most cases - and even worse, everyone thinks they’re really good at it. Leadership is a perennially difficult, immeasurable problem, so suddenly people are saying, “Maybe I can measure some piece of it.” I think there’s been a fairly recent confluence of the ability to crunch lots of data at fairly low cost, venture capital investments that support new businesses in this field, and changes in what people expect. How is Big Data being used more in the leadership and management field?Ī. This interview with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
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