Use Data to Hire Smarter
Google has spent a fortune on how to hire smarter. They have tried a myriad of ways and learned quite bit. Their data can help us and with more of our local thought you can reach farther
Let’s take a look. They used tests with 200 questions and then correlated data and found no piece or group of data predicted a good hire. None.
One clear discovery. Brain teaser questions are worthless in finding the right candidate. Let’s just throw them out.
They tried having as many as 75 people interview. They tried just one doing the interview. Finally, they found 4 people interviewing is best. It helps to eliminate hidden biases. Take a look at this quote from the Atlantic article on this google research.
Four meticulously orchestrated Google interviews could identify successful hires with 86 percent confidence, and nobody at the company—no matter how long they had been at the company or how many candidates they had interviewed—could do any better than the aggregated wisdom of four interviewers.
A Deeper Look at Hiring Smarter
I want to unpack that a bit.
4 often is a disaster. Why? How many companies can achieve ‘meticulously orchestrated’? If they did, could they have enough research to get the right interview to happen? Also, can we avoid lack of ownership where none of the four really feel they are the owner as they know there are three others? That problem really exists. We must not assume our team is on the same page.
In practice, it is hard to get 4 people on the same page with the same goals and understanding of the need. We see few companies that can get there. It is critically important though if you want to use a team.
Google achieved 86% good hires by their great efforts. We do a lot better. We are over 95% good hires. I think Google also places a lot of recent graduates, and we claim no expertise in hiring recent grads by our process. Recent grads are harder for us as have no or little work history. So, I applaud their work. I also applaud ours.
We Like That We Found How to Hire Smarter
SHI Group integrates the interview and background check on management to weed out bad hires almost completely. We are able to get predictive small data by this process that proves to be the key. When hiring managers understand more deeply what we are doing, the process and success get even better.
We highly respect what Google has done. For recent hires in their context, they know more than us. For management, we are on top.