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Comment by webwright | Hacker News Reader

The interview process in this case worked fine. But it's silly and probably causes them to miss a LOT of good candidates. It's measuring a subjects ability to think critically... quickly and while under a lot of pressure.

Is SPEED of critical thinking important? How many positions at Google require people to think on their feet? How many positions require them to be comfortable/effective talking to strangers on the phone (for this woman's position, it might be the case)?

Check out the War For Talent ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/157851459 )... Andrew Chen has a good blog post talking about it: http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/07/28/what-if-interviews-poor...

Bottom line is that studies show over and over that "if you look at the marks that people get coming out of a hiring process versus the on-the-job marks they get in their first year in a job, they are actually not correlated at all."

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With regards to your last point: I don't doubt that the vast majority of hiring processes aren't correlated with on-the-job success, but Google is definitely the kind of company that would strive for objective measures and to refine their process. They at least claim it's working. I think it was on the Stack Overflow podcast that I heard a discussion of Peter Norvig's remarks about this in Coders at Work. He evidently posted something similar online:

"Our interviews are more to do with practical problem solving, not with puzzles and tricks. Our interview scores actually correlate very well with on-the-job performance: we are doing quite well at hiring the right people, we believe, and we work hard at analyzing the process. Peter Seibel asked me if there was anything counterintuitive about the process and I said that people who got one low score but were hired anyway did well on-the-job. To me, that means the interview process is doing very well, not that it is broken. It means that we don't let one bad interview blackball a candidate. We'll keep interviewing, keep hiring, and keep analyzing the results to improve the process." http://www.mv-voice.com/square/index.php?i=3&d=&t=16...

It would be very interesting to know how Google measures on-the-job performance since you obviously can't talk about correlation without numbers backing it up. I seem to recall having read that on-the-job-performance is not as easily measurable than Norvig seems to imply but I guess that if they successfully managed to reach this Holy Grail they probably won't share the numbers, even less the methods.

Promotion at Google is based on peer feedback, so I'd guess that's what they use.

Speed of critical thinking for simple questions like the $0.10 ad-click question probably is important. If someone can't figure out the answer to that one pretty fast, they're probably not going to successfully figure out really hard problems at all.

True, although I have to wonder if she couldn't have figured it out easily under less stressful circumstances. What's baffling to me is how anyone could think interviews are a good technique for identifying job talent. Many, many (most?) people perform FAR below peak under pressure and that sort of pressure is almost non-existent in most jobs. This isn't pro basketball here.

Apart from the arithmetic fail, I think she did more than well in the creative/copy part. In fact, I think she did more than well. She recognized the brand value, put the story edit in line with the brand/tagline and made a plausible copy on the spot in a situation that is far from normal for that kind of work. All in all, it depends for what she was interviewed for, but then again Google is not good at/famous for copywriting/advertising - they are a technical analysis company, not a creative one.

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