When most companies search for a qualified candidate, it often ends in a tough choice among qualified candidates. One person gets the jobs, while a handful of other well qualified candidates might grind their way to the competition.
That’s not the case with Google.
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) hires every candidate they consider to be a top talent even if they job they interviewed for was filled.
Google trapped in a supply and demand equation
Google, you see, is currently trapped in a supply and demand equation. With 55,000 employees, the firm is rapidly adding 6,000 new hires, mostly from highly coveted technical areas where competition for the best talent can be fierce.
The policy of “hiring all the best people,” Business Insider points out, came about when Senior Vice President of Products, Jonathan Rosenberg was speaking with a group of Rhodes Scholars and having a difficult time to decide which of the “exceptional group” should be asked in for an interview. When he learned of Rosenberg’s talent overload problem, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) founder Sergey Brin looked at the situation and offered the simplest of all solutions that defied conventional human resources orthodoxy. “Why decide at all,” he said. “Offer them all jobs.”
It is this type of out of the box thinking that is detailed in the book “How Google Works,” authored by Rosenberg and executive chairman and past CEO Eric Schmidt.
Google’s hiring process
Hiring the right people is among the most important component in a business, the executives write, but judging from the established processes in many corporations the opposite is happening. “The higher up you go in most organizations, the more detached the executives get from the hiring process. The inverse should be true.”
Rosenberg and Schmidt like to get middle management out of the process of hiring what could be their competition in years to come. They say middle management may not be in the same position for the long run and may avoid hiring talented staff that could eventually challenge or replace them. Using a peer-based, academic model, Google doesn’t want to hire people who employees feel comfortable with – avoiding the employee you might want to have beers with after work in favor of the employee who might challenge the status quo with innovative thinking.
For much of its early process hiring, however, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) has been known to employ computer algorithms to sift through hundreds of thousands of resumes and avoid bias in its early filtering process.
