Marketing Pilgrim

The Wall Street Journal looks at Google’s attempts to streamline its infamous lengthy hiring process.

One initiative Google has already undertaken is reducing the number of interviews. Mr. Bock says each candidate offered a job by Google went through 5.1 in-person interviews on average in June, down from 6.2 at the beginning of the year. (A veteran tech recruiter says five to eight interviews is probably about average for Silicon Valley.) Google is also considering requiring staff members who interview candidates to submit their assessments within a week of the interview; right now, there’s no strict deadline.

Google is also surveying existing employees in hopes of gaining clues as to what makes a successful hire.

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.

Hat-tip to SEW.