
Google Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy, "only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees" - danw
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-strategy.html
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gaborcselle
There are a various underlying assumptions here which aren't necessarily true.

First, it's hard to measure candidate and employee quality on one single
scale, with a standard deviation of only 15%.

Second, people you hire aren't always going to perform at the level of
performance you estimated, independent of the project you put them on.

Third, your candidate pool won't always contain people who are smarter than
the mean. I'm sure Google is now attracting the best and the brightest, but
will the same be true 5 years from now?

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phil
Plus the candidate pool is of finite size, and Google has been drinking pretty
deeply from it for a long time now.

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NickDouglas
It's pretty awesome that Google has invented a magical machine for determining
an employee's worth.

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danw
Aye, I'm curious where this magical employee vaule number comes from and how
you can tell what it is before they've even worked for google!

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schoudha
You'd be surprised how much you can learn about a person's ability by
interviewing people correctly.

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marketer
Trust me, they don't use the Lake Woebegon stratgey. In Lake Woebegon, "all
the women are strong, and all the men are good-looking". I don't want to make
any assumptions about the women, but any visit to Google will reveal the men
are not very attractive.

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brianmckenzie
I find their 'hiring at the company level' the most interesting. Whenever I've
hired people in the past it has been on a project or department level, but it
does make a lot of sense not to do it that way.

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zach
Come on, Peter, start the axes at zero or at least do us the favor of using a
broken axis.

