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.
