Willy Braun, Laszlo Bock

Companies with sophisticated HR practices such as Google use […] a “combination of structured interviews with assessments of cognitive ability, conscientiousness and leadership.” At Google, their interview questions are build around four pillars: “general cognitive ability, leadership, googleyness and role-related knowledge”

Laszlo Bock

Most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds. “Tell me about yourself.” “What is your greatest weakness?” “What is your greatest strength?” Worthless. Equally worthless are the case interviews and brainteasers used by many firms.

Here’s Google’s Secret to Hiring the Best People

Most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds.

Laszlo Bock

Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure. They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved.

How to Get a Job at Google

According to Google’s Senior Vice President of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, the five traits most predictive of success in the workplace are:

  1. General cognitive ability (not I.Q. but learning ability; the ability to process on the fly, to pull together disparate bits of information)
  2. Leadership – in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club?…We don’t care.

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