Google’s Guide to Hiring the Top Talent in the World: Know Who You Want

During its first decade, Google essentially screened for just one characteristic in prospective employees – brilliance. If a candidate had graduated from a top school in computer science or engineering they had a decent shot at making the team. It was that simple.

Yet, years later, in 2007, after carefully searching for common themes across their ten-thousand-person organization, it became quite evident that there were actually five attributes that nearly all Googlers had in common. These traits were quickly enshrined in their hiring ethos and are now the standard by which every candidate is measured.

The five characteristics that Google looks for in every hire are: passion, intelligence, curiosity, character and leadership.

1. Passion

Some of the hallmarks of passion are “persistence, grit, seriousness, and all-encompassing absorption” - characteristics that are certain to drive performance. But how do you determine if someone is truly passionate, especially when savvy interviewees are prepared for questions around this topic and often recite memorized answers that are bound to impress? 

Google’s approach is to ask candidates about their extracurricular pursuits. This often brings down their guard and empowers you to gain more insight into their personalities.

When this happens, listen very carefully to how they are passionate. Do they prefer isolated sports (golf, marathons, chess) or those with teams? Also, try to pick up on why they are passionate about each activity. Do they enjoy learning and experiencing new things? Do they get a thrill out of pushing their bodies and minds to the limits?

One of Sergey Brin’s favorite interview questions to asses someone’s passion is: “could you teach me something complicated I don’t know?” Another commonly used question at Google is “if I were to look at the web history section of your browser, what would I learn about you that isn’t on your resume?”

2. Intelligence

Google believes that bringing the most brilliant people (what they call “smart creatives”) into the company is the most important task of every hiring manager. Thus, they are more focused on what talented smart creatives can offer generally - their ability to think and solve complex problems - than what relevant experience they can immediately bring to an open role. Sure they still test for role-related knowledge but it is the least important attribute they screen for.

Erich Schmidt summarizes this philosophy succinctly by saying, “favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong…The world is changing so fast across every industry that it’s a given the role for which you’re hiring is going to change. A specialist brings an inherent bias to solving problems that spawns from the very expertise this is his putative advantage, and may be threatened by a new type of solution that requires new expertise.” A smart generalist, on the other hand, doesn’t have as much bias and is inclined to think creatively to solve complex problems.

To asses a candidate’s intelligence, Google often uses scenario-based questions that dive deep into the thinking behind a big decision. A few good examples are, “what was the low point in the project? Why was it successful? Why did you decide to take that course of action?”

A great example of this hire-for-intelligence-not-for-a-role approach was when Eric Schmidt hired Sheryl Sandberg even though he didn’t have a job for her. Like most smart creatives, Sheryl quickly found a big challenge that needed to be solved and thus a role (and a superstar) was born.

This approach certainly brings risks however. “It leads to some failures, and the start-up costs for hiring a brilliant, inexperience person are higher than those of hiring a less-brilliant, experience one.” But ultimately, “hiring brilliant generalists is far better for the company.”

3. Curiosity

“Intelligence is the best indicator of a person’s ability to change. It is not, however, the only ingredient. Our ideal candidates are the ones who prefer roller coasters, the ones who keep learning. These ‘learning animals’ have the smarts to handle massive change and the character to love it.”

But, how do you determine if someone has a natural affection for continuous learning and development? Jonathan Rosenberg, former SVP of Product, often asks candidates “What big trend did you miss about the Internet in 1996? What did you get right, and what did you get wrong?” The answer to this question is nearly impossible to fake. It can be adapted to any big events of the recent past. “The point is not to see if someone was prescient, but rather how she evolved her thinking and learned from her mistakes.”

A few more examples of great interview questions to gauge someone’s natural curiosity include “what books are you reading right now?” and “what surprised you about that event in your life?”

Also, it’s important that “once you hire those learning animals, to keep learning them. Create opportunities for every employee to be constantly learning new things – even skills and experience that aren’t directly beneficial to the company – and then expect them to use them.”

4. Character

Nearly everyone is familiar with Google’s “don’t be evil” value statement. But hiring for character is not just limited to treating others well, being honest, courageous, and selfless. Google also focuses on someone “who is well-rounded and engaged with the world. Someone who is interesting.”

To assess whether someone is interesting, Google interviewers imagine themselves being stuck in an airport (LAX, LaGuardia, Atlanta) with this candidate for six hours and wondering “would I be able to pass time in a good conversation with him? Would it be time well spent, or would I be quickly finding myself…doing anything to avoid having to talk to this dull person?”

In other words, Google believes that their company is better off when they are recruiting people that have ambition and drive, listening and communication skills, bias to action, interpersonal skills, creativity, and integrity.

After all, interesting people make everyone's professional lives merrier.

5. Leadership

Google expects all employees to be builders, self-starters, strategic-thinkers, and entrepreneurs. They want people that have a natural bent towards solving a problem when they see one, regardless of whether it's in their scope or purview of responsibility. In other words, they want leaders, people they call "mini-founders."

Laszlo Bock, former SVP of People Operations, describes their philosophy this way, “the fundamental lesson from Google’s experience is that you must first choose whether or not you want to be a founder or an employee. It’s not a question of literal ownership. It’s a question of attitude…We want founders.”

YouTube, AdWords, AdSense, Google Maps, Google Glass and countless other products were initiated and led by employees without formal leadership titles. Rather, these smart creatives saw a problem and were obsessively driven to solve it and thereby, make the world a better place.

To assess for one's proclivity for leadership, here are a few sample interview questions that Google uses: “What projects have you started on your own? Why did you start the projects? What did you learn from doing the projects? What were the results?”

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