There is a myth in Silicon Valley that Google hires Stanford and Harvard alumni for even the most mundane and primitive jobs. However, Google VP of HR Laszlo Bock said that a diploma is losing its meaning in the modern world. In some parts of Google, the proportion of employees with no college degrees is as high as 14%. Laszlo Bock named several qualities that Google primarily values in its future employees.
General cognitive abilities
This is not about IQ, but about the ability to learn quickly. You need to be able to grasp information on the fly and tie together disparate parts of it.
Occasional Leadership Required at the Right Time
Traditional leadership can be considered as being at some point in time as president of a chess club, vice president of sales, and so on. This kind of leadership is not important to Google, just like the time spent getting the position.
Real leadership is when you, as a team member, faced a problem and at the right moment came forward, offering your solution. It is also important to let others lead in time, stepping aside. A good leader must be able to relinquish power.
Intellectual humility
Without this quality, an employee will not be able to learn something new. Laszlo Bock says the people they want to hire can be violent, arguable, but when they see new facts, these people will be able to acknowledge them and back down in time.
Many graduates of top business schools do not know this: they ascribe victories to themselves, and their own defeats to others.
Responsibility
In English, this is called ownership - the attitude to common problems as to your own, the willingness to come forward and solve the problem that has arisen on your own.
Not an experience at all
The least significant of all the parameters listed is experience. You can hire a world renowned expert in any field, Bock says, and he will tell you, "I've seen this a hundred times, here you have to do this."
However, a curious, talented person, capable of leadership and willing to learn, but without experience, will also find this solution. He may be wrong somewhere, but sometimes he will be able to give something new and original, and this is an order of magnitude more valuable than experience.
The vice president of Google is trying to convey a simple message: if before they hired only graduates of the best educational institutions, now they can simply hire the best.
