Is Your Hiring Process More Like a Quick Coffee or Sharing a 7-Day Adventure Together?

The pres­ence of a huge train­ing bud­get is not evi­dence that you’re invest­ing in your peo­ple. It’s evi­dence that you failed to hire the right peo­ple to begin with.” — Las­z­lo Bock, SVP, Peo­ple Oper­a­tions at Google*

One of the most inter­est­ing books I’ve read in the last few months is ​“Work Rules” by Las­z­lo Bock. It’s about how Google hires and devel­ops amaz­ing talent.

As you know, it’s extreme­ly hard to get into Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty. Sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, it’s even hard­er to work at Google. They scru­ti­nize new hires unbe­liev­ably because in order to cre­ate the best prod­ucts, they have to hire the best peo­ple. In the book, Bock walks through every­thing Google does to find the best tal­ent, based on data about what works, rather than the­o­ries of how to get the best out of people.

Many com­pa­nies put a mod­er­ate amount of time, ener­gy and cost into hir­ing — and then a lot of mon­ey into train­ing to get the best out of them.

While that sounds log­i­cal, Google flips the mod­el: they over-invest in hir­ing, and under-invest in train­ing. When you hire the best of the best, they don’t need a lot of train­ing! A+ play­ers can define ways to grow them­selves, and don’t need com­pa­ny pro­grams to make that happen.

It makes a lot of sense.

You’d think tal­ent­ed peo­ple are easy to spot, but they are not. Hir­ing is one of the biggest chal­lenges in busi­ness, and many are tricked into hir­ing those who are not that great. We don’t get to know the per­son well. We don’t scru­ti­nize enough – and are often fooled and dis­ap­point­ed. If you have typ­i­cal hir­ing prac­tices you’ll hire typ­i­cal people.

But if your hir­ing prac­tices are phe­nom­e­nal, you’ll hire phe­nom­e­nal people.

The root of hir­ing good peo­ple is to real­ly under­stand their char­ac­ter, and their abil­i­ty to deliv­er out­stand­ing results. You can’t tell that from how some­one looks, talks, or from read­ing their resume.

A good way to get to know some­one is to talk over lunch (which is what most peo­ple do).

A bet­ter way is to spend 3 – 4 hours togeth­er — dri­ve some­where, do an activ­i­ty, sit on a plane.

The best way? Spend 24 hours togeth­er for 7 days. Get in a small car, share meals and spend every wak­ing hour in each other’s company.

Now, this is not a rec­om­mend­ed hir­ing prac­tice: it’s about the need to under­stand a per­son more than you nor­mal­ly do.

The impres­sion you get after a 7‑day adven­ture is dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent than the one over lunch. Remem­ber, you’ll be spend­ing more than 7 days with them if you hire them – and would want you do that after learn­ing about their soul? About their quirks? Their strengths?

Would you want to do it again?

Now you’re not going to spend 24 hours/​7 days a week togeth­er, but if you want to under­stand a per­son, here are some sug­ges­tions I’ve seen work:

• Use a method like Top Grad­ing — it’s like the 7‑day approach to under­stand char­ac­ter and patterns
• Get per­spec­tive by speak­ing to all man­agers in the candidate’s work his­to­ry – even if this means reach­ing back 20 years or talk­ing to their professors
• Give can­di­dates a real project – a real, on-the-job assign­ment to see how they pro­duce the kind of work they will be doing if they’re hired
• Do per­son­al­i­ty pro­files. A favourite is DISC, which gives you a sense of a person’s nat­ur­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions styles and insights.

PS — If you want to learn more about how to get bet­ter at hir­ing the best tal­ent let me know…we have experts who can help you.

*The author of ​“WORK RULES! Insights from Inside Google to Trans­form How You Live and Lead”, Las­z­lo Bock leads Google’s peo­ple func­tion, respon­si­ble for attract­ing, devel­op­ing, retain­ing, and delight­ing ​“Googlers.” Dur­ing Bock­’s tenure, Google has been named the Best Com­pa­ny to Work For more than 30 times around the world, and received over 100 awards as an employ­er of choice.