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01/10/2025 08:04:29 am

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Google HR: GPA and most interviews are useless

Google is likely to be the company that obtains the largest amount of data on the planet. The obsession on data carries through to hiring and management, in which every decision and practice will be endlessly studied and analyzed.


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Laszlo Bock, Google's Senior Vice President of People Operations, explains in an interview with The New York Times' Adam Bryant, that when making the hiring and recruiting decisions, some of the "important" elements, such as the interview, GPA, and test scores are actually not as important as people think. Google has found workers' success in the company does not correlate at all with GPA or test scores, even for new grads, the correlation is pretty slight.

Nowadays, when Google is making hiring and recruiting decisions, it does not ask for GPA or test scores from candidates anymore, except those who are a year or two out of school.

Laszlo Bock has a perfect explanation about why those metrics are not so important.

"Academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained; they're conditioned to succeed in that environment. While in school, people are trained to give specific answers, it's much more interesting to solve problems where there isn't an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer."

"Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring," Bock continues, "We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship."

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