It might be possible for a company like Google, which is so buried in qualified applicants that they could decide to only hire left-handed people born on a Monday and they'd still be able to fill all their open positions.
Especially if you're the kind of company that doesn't need to make many experienced hires, but recruits a lot of people straight off college campuses.
And they can do all of that just because everybody still wants to work at Google. Let's say the have 100 applicants for a position, out of which 10 are qualified for it. Then they can still screw 9 of them and hire the one person that for one reason or the other had the luck of interviewing with the right people and talking to the right recruiters.
It’s not that “no one else” could do their job, but there’s not an unlimited supply of people who can meet the hiring bar at Google/Facebook/Microsoft, and there are a number of employers with deep pockets trying to hire them. Google in particular is known to offer people with competing offers a lot of money to keep them from going to other companies.
What criteria determines who should get a position then? What salary should those positions command? Sounds pretty handwavy.
Edit: responders to this comment seem to miss that the parent comment is suggesting Google hire new individuals and train them, not find talent in their workforce and do training there. Thats the unrealistic part- creating a secondary application process for individuals without the skills -- when they already reject a ridiculous number of people with many of the skills.
companies like google and apple can largely behave as they please during hiring, because the resulting candidate loss is offset by the relatively massive size of the candidate pool. there's always plenty willing to put up with whatever they do.
Not many, and they would mostly be acqui-hires or early hires. Google strongly prefers candidates from a list of preferred universities. If you didn't graduate from one, you'd need to be coming from another employer in order to get hired there (and even then, my understanding is that those with degrees from those universities have a better chance of being hired, all other things being equal).
They also hire (or at least recruit) based on Open Source work (I've gotten recruitment letters from them based on a book I wrote and some Open Source software I've been involved in), but I doubt that I would have been hired just on the strength of that. I've never taken them up on the offer of an interview, as I liked working for myself too much, but I suspect I would not measure up during the process, given my self-taught background and unimpressive education history. I know several folks who have been hired by Google, including folks who got the recruitment letter based on Open Source software work, and they tend to also have the strong college background.
In short, I believe that for those folks who end up at Google, they very likely got there by way of a good university. So, the upstream needs to be fixed for the diversity at Google to be fixed.
Do you mean forgoing an opportunity to shape it through choosing who gets hired?
Google's process is engineered in such a way that individuals will not be able to individually skew cultural selection for new hires, so I don't think they would even see hiring as such an opportunity.
Or were you talking about the more classic issue of whether it's more effective to be an insider vs. an outsider to affect change?
As long as startups refuse to hire unless they find a young white/asian guy who's good on the spot/whiteboard with trivia questions you'll have a hard time hiring---google or not.
I've twenty years experience and couldn't get hired last year, so gave up and joined a freelancer site. Getting lots of work now, no questions asked, and guess what? Five star reviews, and work from home. I'm not interested in games and prefer to get work done.
That may be true but will also effectively exclude strong experienced candidates with options. It worked well for Google in post-dotcom crash frenzy of early 2000s but may not work very well today ;)
Since you live in the US, and benefits for parents are almost non existent and letting people go if things don't work out is cheap, I wouldn't think anyone at Google would fail at attracting talent because of a pregnancy.
I don't think they'll even ask, and I would feel offended and would never answer such question regardless of my state.
Maybe you didn't read my earlier post where I said that Google will hire as many qualified people as it can. There is no upper limit. Nobody is excluded because of quotas or whatever.
If Google has 100 X's and 10 Y's and hires 10 X's and 1 Y every year, the ratio of X's to Y's stays the same. If Google increases the number of Y's they hire each year to 2, the ratio of X's to Y's decreases. Not sure what's so hard to comprehend about this.
Arguably the best place for that though is a startup where your first employee with a large stake?
There's no doubt there would be many very interesting positions at Google, but I'd imagine there would also be some very boring positions for developers straight out of college.
"If the number of hires is kept constant" is a huge IF that just doesn't hold up. If Google (or FB, or Apple) could find more candidates that met their hiring bar, they'd hire them as well. It's not a zero-sum game - these companies are constantly short on qualified engineers.
My point wasn't necessarily that you can't get hired at Google, but that it's fairly well-documented that Google during the first decade or so of its existence explicitly favored candidates from elite school. That culture isn't something you just change overnight. I put no judgement in that fact, just that it's unlikely to produce relativly more diversity, non-conformity or original thinking compared to other hiring methodologies.
Edit: From Eric Schmidt himself:
> A few of the rules we had were: we didn’t want to hire your friends, we didn’t want to hire people from “lesser universities,” we only wanted to hire people with very high GPA’s. The constant problem was somebody was a good employee, had someone they had worked with, who was very loyal, but not from a great university, did not have a high GPA. We would not hire these people. It was controversial. We relaxed it a bit now, but the fact of the matter is it got us to the point of where we are today. They got us these intelligent generalists from top Universities.
> "Even though the actress Gwyneth Paltrow had created a best-selling cookbook and popular lifestyle blog, Mayer, who habitually asked deputies where they attended college, balked at hiring her as a contributing editor for Yahoo Food. According to one executive, Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college."
i'm impressed with your belief in google. You can't just do it. It's a giant institution with rules and hiring process is formal and can't be done by the team.
Especially if you're the kind of company that doesn't need to make many experienced hires, but recruits a lot of people straight off college campuses.
reply