I
am reproducing hereunder an ‘article’ wrote by Thomas L Friedman that carry
enough of inner meaning within it to acquire knowledge about ourselves who
exactly we are in order to create a rightful environment around ourselves to
grow together with time. The ‘article’ is available in the following Link:
Last
June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The New York Times, Laszlo Bock, the
senior vice president of people operations for Google – i.e, the guy in charge
of hiring for one of the world’s most successful companies - noted that Google
had determined that academic results weren’t very important.‘‘[Grade point
averages] are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless
...We found that they don’t predict anything.’’ He also noted that the
‘‘proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased
over time’’ - now as high as 14 per cent on some teams. At a time when many
people are asking, ‘‘How’s my kid gonna get a job?’’ I thought it would be
useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer. Don’t get him wrong,
Bock begins, ‘‘Good grades certainly don’t hurt.’’ Many jobs at Google require
maths, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills
in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its
eyes on much more.
“There
are five hiring attributes we have across the company,’’ explained Bock. ‘‘If
it’s a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the
company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for
is general cognitive ability, and it’s not IQ. It’s learning ability. It’s the
ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits
of information. We assess that, using structured behavioural interviews, that
we validate to make sure they’re predictive.’’
The
second, he added, ‘‘is leadership - in particular emergent leadership as
opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you
president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did
you get there? We don’t care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem
and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and
lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let
someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this
environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power.’’
What
else? Humility and ownership.
‘‘It’s
feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,’’ he
said, to try to solve any problem - and the humility to step back and embrace
the better ideas of others. ‘‘Your end goal,’’ explained Bock, ‘‘is what can we
do together to problem solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step
back.’’ And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute,
says Bock, it’s ‘‘intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to
learn''. It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business
schools plateau. ‘‘Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they
don’t learn how to learn from that failure,’’ Bock said.
‘‘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 ... What
we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to
hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots
about their point of view. But then you say, ’here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll
go, ’Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’’’ You need a big ego and
small ego in the same person at the same time.
The least important attribute
they look for is ‘‘expertise’’. Said Bock: ‘‘If you take somebody who has high cognitive
ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership
skills, and you hire them as an HR person or finance person, and they have no
content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who’s been doing just one
thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: ’I’ve seen this 100 times
before; here’s what you do.’’’ Most of the time the non expert will come up
with the same answer, added Bock, ‘‘because most of the time it’s not that
hard’’. Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a
while they’ll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is
huge value in that.
To
sum up Bock’s approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms
and be built in so many non-traditional ways today; hiring officers have to be
alive to every one - besides brand-name universities. Because ‘‘when you look
at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, such are
exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those
people.’’ Too many universities, he added, ‘‘don’t deliver on what they
promise. You generate a tonne of debt; you don’t learn the most useful things
for your life. It’s [just] an extended adolescence.’’
Google
attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like
GPA. For most young people, though, going to university and doing well is still
the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying
something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your
ability to do any job. The world only cares about - and pays off on - what you
can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it). And in an
age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavour, it also cares about a
lot of soft skills - leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and
loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work
END
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