5 ways to get a job in Google

Excellent G.P.A’s, test scores and brand name colleges are no more the criteria for hiring in Google, says Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google. However, that does not mean that students with good grades will not be eligible to work with Google. Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more. So, what actually is required by Google? Bock talks about five hiring attributes that Google sees in its applicants. Click on this slide show to know these 5 things that will fix your job in Google…

General cognitive ability/Learning ability According to Bock, if it’s a technical role, Google assess the coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing they look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. Google assess that using structured behavioral interviews that they validate to make sure they’re predictive.

Leadership Skills The second, he added, is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? Google doesn’t care. What they care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power.

Humility and ownership What else? Humility and ownership. It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. Your end goal, explained Bock, is what can Google do together to problem-solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.

Intellectual humility And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it’s ‘intellectual humility’. Without humility, you are unable to learn. It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure.

Expertise The least important attribute they look for is ‘expertise.’ Bock says, “If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who’s been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: ‘I’ve seen this 100 times before; here’s what you do.” Most of the time the non expert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, “because most of the time it’s not that hard.” Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they’ll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.