This book gives an insight into the culture and approach to people at Google and would be particularly relevant to someone who works in HR and especially those working in a large tech firm as many of the examples are technology and big-company related.
This book would also be interesting to anyone that is involved in an interviewing process (chapters 3, 4 and 5) or an employee review process (chapter 7). i.e. most professionals at some point in their career and I will be using the lessons from this book in my next interview process and I’m sure I will have a better chance of hiring a better candidate because of it.
Here’s what I took from the book
• Google fosters an environment where work is meaningful and employees and their families are looked after.
• Linking emotion and moral motivation to employees’ roles can radically improve performance
On hiring
• Recruiting in the typical way will result in average hires and average performance
• The highest return on time and money is investing in your recruitment process to hire better people. Spend a disproportionate amount of money finding and hiring great people.
• Hiring bad people requires significant resources to coach or extricate them from the business
• Hiring exclusively for smarts is also not the correct approach. You will miss out on many valuable people.
• Academic performance doesn’t predict job performance for more than the first few years in a job after university
• Your existing employees are a very useful way of finding new employees through referrals and referencing.
• Research shows that interviewers often make a decision on a candidate within the first seconds of an interview
• Interviews are a terrible leading indicator of performance. Studies show that unstructured interviews explain 14% of performance vs work experience (3%), work sample test (29%), general cognitive ability (26%) and structured interviews (26%)
• Use a standardised list of questions to create a styructured interview and improve your chances of success.
• Incremental interviews show diminishing returns for predicting performance. 4 interviews is a good number
• Google has a few key rules for hiring people:
o Set a high bar for quality. Hire people that are better than you. Never compromise
o Find your own candidates and don’t rely on headhunters
o Assess candidates objectively using structured interviews, references etc
o Sell yourself effectively to candidates
On management
• Google give employees 20% of their time to work on individual projects
• Men often have higher salaries than their female counterparts because they are more likely to ask for a raise
• Use data extensively by collecting feedback and using this feedback to predict problems before they happen
• Conduct feedback sessions and pay review sessions separately
On feedback and remuneration
• Conduct feedback sessions and pay review sessions separately
• Most companies don’t pay their best people enough because they don’t understand how valuable they are
• Pay your top people very well
- Format: Kindle Edition
- File Size: 3299 KB
- Print Length: 417 pages
- Publisher: John Murray; 01 edition (7 April 2015)
- Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00NLHJKBE
- Text-to-Speech:
Enabled
- Word Wise: Enabled
- Customer Reviews: 71 customer reviews
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#40,987 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #21 in HR & Personnel Management
- #157 in Human Resources Management
- #28 in International Business & Investing
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