“How many piano tuners are there in the world? You don’t know?”
“OK, perhaps you can design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.”
“Struggling with that one too eh? Fine. Why don’t you explain why manhole covers are round instead?”
Confused? So are we and so must countless hopeful candidates for jobs at Google over the last few years. Until the company decided to drop the brainteasers as part of its interview that is.
Google’s senior vice president of people operations, Laszlo Bock, told the New York Times: “On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”
Since ditching the approach pioneered in Silicon Valley by Microsoft in the 1990s, and reported to be used by the likes of Apple and Facebook, Goole has moved to a competency-based system. Candidates are invited to reference examples from their working lives where they demonstrate the skills required for the role in question. The interviewer is supported by a consistent criterion against which they can judge the candidate’s answers.
“The interesting thing about the competency interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information,” Bock said. “One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable ‘meta’ information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.”
Alternative techniques could be to test hopefuls in a task-orientated interview by providing them with problems to solve to demonstrate creative skills or technical knowledge. Small group interviews allow organisations to gain a range of opinions on a candidate as opposed to a one-to-one approach which is likely to prove more subjective.
The method abandoned by Google has similarities with stress interviews. These involve an interviewer attempting to bait a candidate to test how they react to pressure. Often they can repel candidates and there is some evidence that qualified candidates were put off by the quirky questioning they expected to be subjected to at Google.
Whichever option organisations choose, it is vital to be consistent and to be driven at all times by the desire to find the best person for the job. If you found this interesting, we have created a site where HR professionals can access free guides and join conversations on the latest developments in the industry. Join us today.
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