CASE STUDY: How Google Chooses Employees
Please read the case study and answer each question in paragraph form because this has to be a 2pg paper with a introduction and a conclusion.
Finding the best engineers, programmers, and sales representatives is a challenge for any company, but it’s especially tough for a company growing as fast as Google. In recent years, the company has doubled its ranks every year and has no plans to slow its hiring. More than 100,000 job applications pour into Google every month, and staffers have to sort through them to fill as many as 200 positions a week.
Early on, the company narrowed the pool of applicants by setting a very high bar on traditional measures such as academic success. For example, an engineer had to have made it through school with a 3.7 grade-point average. Such criteria helped the company find a manageable number of applicants to interview, but no one had really considered whether they were the most valid way to predict success at the company. More recently, the company has tried to apply its quantitative excellence to the problem of making better selection decisions. First, it set out to measure which selection criteria were important. It did this by conducting a survey of employees who had been with Google for at least five months. These questions addressed a wide variety of characteristics, such as areas of technical expertise, workplace behavior, personality, and even some nonwork habits that might uncover something important about candidates. For example, perhaps subscribing to a certain magazine or owning a dog could be related to success at Google by indirectly measuring some important trait no one had thought to ask about. The results of the survey were compared with measures of successful performance, including performance appraisals, compensation, and organizational citizenship (behaving in ways that contribute to the company beyond what the job requires).
One important lesson of this effort was that academic performance was not the best predictor of success at Google. No single factor predicted success at every job, but a combination of factors could help predict success in particular positions. From this information, Google compiled a set of questionnaires that were related to success in particular kinds of work at Google: engineering, sales, finance, and human resources. Now people who apply to work at Google go online to answer questions such as “Have you ever started a club or recreational group?” and “Compared to other people in your peer group, how would you describe the age at which you first got into (i.e., got excited about them, started using them, etc.) computers on a scale from 1 [much later than others] to 10 [much earlier than others]?” The data are analyzed by a series of formulas that compute scores from 1 to 100. The score predicts how well the applicant is expected to fit into the type of position at Google. Michael Mumford, an expert in talent assessment at the University of Oklahoma, says that, in general, this approach to predicting performance is effective, but only when it relies on reasonable measures. So, starting a club might be a way to measure leadership behavior, but owning a dog (a measure Google abandoned) should be used only if the employer can find an explanation for why it is relevant.
Questions
1. Based on the information given, would you say that Google’s use of questionnaires is a reliable, valid, and generalizable way to select employees? Why or why not?
2. How does this approach to selection contribute to making selection decisions that avoid illegal discrimination?
3. Besides the questionnaires, what other selection methods would you recommend that Google use?How would these improve selection decisions?