] by Laszlo Bock @wired.com - Senior VP of People @google writes on the google interview and candidate selection process, his view on it. Article is excerpted from his Book - Work Rules
DISCLOSURE - I am the Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google, and some of these interview questions have been and I’m sure continue to be used at the company. Sorry about that. We do everything we can to discourage this, and when our senior leaders—myself included—review applicants each week, we ignore the answers to these questions.
[WHY]
] Tricia Prickett and Neha Gada-Jain, two psychology students at the University of Toledo, collaborated with their professor Frank Bernieri and reported in a 2000 study that judgments made in the first 10 seconds of an interview could predict the outcome of the interview.
] The problem is, these predictions from the first 10 seconds are useless. They create a situation where an interview is spent trying to confirm what we think of someone, rather than truly assessing them
] most interviews are a waste of time
] because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds.
] questions like the following ..., are useless
] how many golf balls can you fit into a 747
] The Unsung Genius of the Structured Interview
]
] The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent)
] example
] The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent). In contrast to case interviews and brainteasers, these are actual tests with defined right and wrong answers
] example
] Tied with tests of general cognitive ability are structured interviews (26 percent), where candidates are asked a consistent set of questions with clear criteria to assess the quality of responses.
There have been volumes written about how "The first five minutes" of an interview are what really matter, describing how interviewers make initial assessments and spend the rest of the interview working to confirm those assessments.
Behavioral interviews ask candidates to describe prior achievements and match those to what is required in the current job.
To help interviewers, we've developed an internal tool called qDroid, where an interviewer picks the job they are screening for, checks the attributes they want to test, and is emailed an interview guide with questions designed to predict performance for that job.
The neat trick here is that, while interviewers can certainly make up their own questions if they wish, by making it easier to rely on the prevalidated ones, we're giving a little nudge toward better, more reliable interviewing.
The interviewer then has to write exactly how the candidate demonstrated their general cognitive ability, so later reviewers can make their own assessment.
Upon hearing about our interview questions and scoring sheets, the same skeptical friend blurted, "Bah! Just more platitudes and corporate speak." But think about the last five people you interviewed for a similar job.
Interviewers can't stand being told that they have to follow a certain format for the interview or for their feedback.