Interviewer Sabotage: The Worst Candidates Hired at Google Do the Best in their Jobs...

Maybe you should be scared when all the folks who interview a candidate in your company come back with high marks.  After all, GROUPTHINK is alive and well in every company, including yours.  Don't tell me it's not, because it is.  Heck, I work at a great place and it's alive and well here.  It just happens, it's human nature.  We like people like us.  Aren't they great?

Could it be that when some folks like the candidate, and some find him/her to be repulsive to the point of questioning your ability as a recruiter, that you've found a STAR? 

Google thinks so.  Prepare for your head to start smoking.

Gawker recently highlighted Q&A at Amazon with Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, former Google director of search quality, as part of the new book Coders at Work. Here's what Norvig had to say about which candidates tend to perform the best once hired at Google:

"One of the interesting things we've found, when trying to predict how well somebody we've hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four, and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success.

Get your head around that for a second.  Your first reaction (like Gawker) is probably that Google doesn't know what it's doing and their whole hiring process is a sham.  That's your first reaction, because it's so fun to take shots at the great places to work.

Then, like me, you probably start thinking about human nature in your own company.  Everyone agrees that the candidate is great?  Probably means your team didn't dig enough on the candidate to find flaws that would be controversial.  If you can find one dissenter out of three or four, at least you've got polar extremes and diversity of thought on whether the candidate would be a good fit. 

Two out of four don't like the candidate for the job in question?  That's interesting, and you've got some things to sort through.

One out of four doesn't like the candidate?  That person's probably protecting turf and thinks the candidate in question would be disruptive to the team and to what's already been accomplished.

Which, of course, is EXACTLY what your company needs from a talent perspective.

Comments

[Bonita]

If there is an inverse relationship between the "successful" candidates in the interview and success on the job, are they measuring the right things in the interview? Maybe they should measure creativity, new ideas, or problem solving ability.

[chris]

Statistics FAIL!

This is clearly a case of sample selection bias at work. Here is the money quote:

"Ninety-nine percent of the people who got a one in one of their interviews we didn't hire. But the rest of them, in order for us to hire them somebody else had to be so passionate that they pounded on the table and said, "I have to hire this person because I see something in him...""

Note: We know NOTHING about the success rate of people who recieve a 1 on one evaluation, because 99% of them are not in the sample.

Basically, the 1% they do hire have some set of critical positive characteristics that cause the hiring team to overrule the bad eval. This doesn't show a problem with their hiring process. In fact, it does just the opposite. Their hiring process is set up to catch a "mistake" --- they don't automatically toss out anyone who got a 1 in an interview. That is a success.

[Ted]

The takeaway for me is that individuals that change things normally have some people that dislike them. Companies that always hire safe will get safe results.

[Ron]

Selection processes and HR experts are really good at selecting people who are good at working the selection process as opposed to the best person for the job but managers are too scared or busy to intervene and no one wants to risk being responsible for hiring a dud anyway.
Recruiters masquerading as quasi scientists come up with a 'new and revolutionary' idea or branded concept that will blow the socks off KPI's with monotonous regularity and it eventually transpires the new process is no more effective than choosing your candidate using a game of pin the tail on the donkey.
Managers have to get their hands dirty and be engaged with the job of hiring as opposed to leaving things to recruitment gurus who know little of what you really require in an employee.