As someone who loves to talk about organizational systems and cultures, Google is a really interesting company. I might go so far as to say Google is a sociological experiment in trying to create a company of self-managed developers. An entrepreneurial company without management overhead. Something that most people would say cannot sustain existance.
It seems impossible but in my brief exposure to Google, I have to admit that I was impressed. They are something different.
But they are also successful and growing. Growth has killed a lot of golden geese at other companies. Can Google maintain their culture and continue to grow? This is a really interesting article about Google's hiring process, one that is every bit as eccentric as Microsoft's.
Google Adjusts Hiring Process As Needs Grow
Wall Street Journal
October 23, 2006
The recruiting fine-tuning is a further sign that Google's in-house processes are in transition from those of a start-up to those of a big business. The eight-year-old company had 9,378 employees at the end of the third quarter, and analysts project that its revenue will top $10 billion this year. During the quarter, the company brought in an average of 16 new employees daily, up from 13 the quarter before. Its breakneck hiring has boosted staff from 1,628 at the end of 2003 to 3,021 a year later and 5,680 at the end of 2005.
In Google's early years, Mr. Brin or co-founder Larry Page interviewed nearly all job candidates before they were officially hired. A former Google executive recounts how, on occasion, Mr. Brin would show up for candidates' job interviews in unconventional dress, from roller blades to a cow costume complete with rubber udders around Halloween. Even today, at least one of the co-founders reviews every job offer recommended by an internal hiring committee on a weekly basis, sometimes pushing back with questions about an individual's qualifications.
People close to the company say it has traditionally focused a lot on candidates' academic performance and favored those who went to elite schools. Mr. Bock says that college grade-point average is a factor, and that most hires have done well academically. But he says there's no formal GPA requirement, and he points to new staff members who don't have college degrees but do have solid professional track records.
Recent candidates say the process can still drag on. "The process from a candidate's perspective is glacial," says one who was interviewed for a senior nonengineering position this year. After each of two in-person interviews, the candidate went more than a month without hearing from Google and finally accepted a job offer from another company.
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In the survey Google conducted in June, current employees were questioned on about 300 variables, including their performance on standardized tests, the age at which they first used a computer, how many foreign languages they spoke, how many patents they had and whether they had ever been published. Mr. Bock's team mapped the answers against 30 or 40 job-performance factors for each survey-taker, identifying clusters of variables that Google might focus on more during the hiring process.
