CASE STUDY #1:
RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION AT GOOGLE
Google is consistently ranked by Fortune magazine as one of the best places to work. It provides employees with excellent pay and a series of perks that are unheard of at most corporations. Some of these perks are flex hours; bring your dog to work; casual dress; on-site free massage and yoga; free snacks, drinks, and meals; and a child care centre among many others. No wonder Google receives close to three million job applications a year. To find the best talent, Google uses carefully selected strategies, methods, and techniques. It recruits at college and university campuses and through the Careers section of its website. Google is very selective, hiring only about 7000 of the three million applicants. It uses different methods to select people for different jobs, but there are some common elements: preliminary screening, employment tests, interviews, and background checks. Google is looking for intelligence, creativity, leadership, and fit with the Google culture, as well as fit to the job. Hiring decisions are made by a committee of peers (people at the same rank with whom the candidate would work if hired), like universities in hiring and promoting faculty. Arguably, both Google and universities operate in the “knowledge industry.”
Questions:
1. Is Google’s elaborate recruitment and selection system justified? What are appropriate criteria for assessing its effectiveness?
2. Google receives over 3,000,000 applications for 7000 positions. Is this an effective approach? How might you introduce efficiency and effectiveness to processing such large numbers of applications?
3. What attributes might Google use in selecting “team players”? How might they recruit and assess for these attributes?
4. Does “peer-based hiring” lead to better employees? Argue your point.
Source: Adapted from E. Schmidt and J. Rosenberg. 2014. How Google Works. New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing.
