In this episode Matt Alder talks to Laszlo Bock SVP of People Operations at Google.
Google’s approach to HR and Recruiting has always been a much discussed topic and Matt was delighted to be able to find out directly how Google has built its incredible success on the back of an innovative approach to talent.
In the interview Laszlo talks about his belief that hiring should the single most important people activity in any organisation and dispels some popular misconceptions about how Google recruits. He also share his thoughts on culture, the importance of data and why Google focuses on “People Operations” rather than Human Resources
Link to Laszlo’s book:
Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock
Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?
Ep14: Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at Google
support for this podcast comes from Monster Worldwide. Monster has two products that are helping to shape the future of social recruiting. Talent been by Monster, which enables companies to source the best tech talent from the open web, and Monster Social Job Ads, which extends job advertising reach to target both passive and active candidates on social platforms, including on Twitter. Hi, and welcome to Episode 14 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. This week's guest is Lazlo Bach, head of People Operations at Google. Google's approach to HR and recruiting has always been a much discussed topic in our industry. I was delighted to get the chance to meet Lazlo in person and hear first hand about Google's approach to people operations. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another recruiting future podcast interview. Today, I'm in Google's offices in London talking with Lazlo Bach. Hi, Lazlo, how are you? Great. Thanks for having me on the show. My pleasure. So many people will obviously know you, but some people might not. Could you quickly introduce yourself and tell us how you got to do what you do? Yeah, so I leave people operations for Google. Most companies call it human resources. We call it people operations. For a bunch of reasons, one of which has to do with all the analytics and science we try to put underneath it. But the way I got here was, I kind of had just about every job under the sun. I worked as a waiter, I worked as a teacher, worked as a lifeguard, was on TV a little bit, worked at a startup, started a nonprofit, and eventually found my way into human resources. Okay. A few years after that decision got hired by Google. Fantastic. That's a somewhat unconventional path into a picture. So you recently published a book, Work Rules. When I read it, I was surprised by the huge amount of detail you went into about Google's approach to hiring, to culture, to talent, management, and even pay strategy. Why did you write it? Well, the biggest reason I wrote it is because I woke up one day and realized that we spend more time working than we do anything else. Nobody works a 40 hour week anymore. So you spend more time working than you do sleeping more than with your friends, more than with the people you love the most, which is kind of terrible. And then for most people, work is just a means to an end. It's not fulfilling. It's not fun. And I thought that was a shame. And so at Google, we've done a bunch of things to kind of move the needle on that. And I came across a lot of other companies in all kinds of different places around the world that have also done things. And I wanted to share that. Fantastic. You say in the book, this is kind of really interesting to me that hiring is the single most important people, like people activity, that any organizations that undertake. Why is it so important to Google? The reason it's the most important thing is because if you're doing hiring right, then you're able to hire people who are way better than average. So let's imagine, you know, instead of hiring average people, you can hire 80 or 90th percentile quality people. If you're doing that right, all the other HR stuff companies do, you kind of don't need to invest a lot in and you don't need to invest a lot in management. Because if you're hiring exceptional people who are smart and curious and motivated and want to do the right thing, they'll figure most of this stuff out for you and they'll reward you, your customers and your company. Yeah, it's interesting. I thought it was very interesting that you said that if you spend so much time on hiring, then people are affected from day one because you've hired the best people. You also say you spend twice as much money as a percentage of your people budget on hiring them, the average company. What's your approach to hiring in the process and how has it evolved everything is? Well, so our hiring approach used to be, we get two to three million applications a year, we comb through all of those. We have a bunch of recruiters who do this and do great work doing it. And we would focus historically a lot on where you went to school, what your grades were, what your test scores were, because the idea was we wanted the smartest people we could find. What we since learned was that none of that predicts performance. It's helpful when you're just out of college, but after a year or two, it doesn't matter where you went to school, it doesn't matter what your grades were. So we look beyond that. And what we now look for is four things, general cognitive ability, so smarts and problem solving, emergent leadership. And I could talk about that if you wish. Yeah, please. Well, so briefly, emergent leadership is so traditional leadership is where you're president of a club, where you're captain of a team, where you're vice president, did you get promoted? We don't care about any of that. Yeah. What we care about is that when you see a problem, you step in, whether it's your job or not to help solve it. And just as importantly, when your role is kind of done, you relinquish power and let somebody else step in and you step out. So we look for that. The third thing is what we call googliness. And simply what that means is kind of cultural fit, but not are you like us. We actually want people to bring something different to the party, something new. We also want intellectual humility and conscientiousness. And then the last and least important thing is expertise. Do you actually know how to do the job? Okay, because again, going back to if you're hiring the right kind of people, right curious people, and they meet these other three attributes, they'll figure the rest out. Cool. And when I was reading the book, I was interested because there's so much gets written about Google's hiring process, mostly by people who, you know, have never worked in it or never gone through it. And it's all about, you know, 20 interviews and crazy brain teasers. Is that true? Or is that? Now that used to be true of it used to be very true. I remember when I interviewed, I had something like 25 interviews before I got the job. And they wanted me to come out for more from New York to California, do even more interviews. And I actually said, you know what, enough, you know me well enough already. I know you just make a decision. So now the average is just over four interviews per person. Hiring time went down from six to nine months on average to about 45 days on average. We're working to get that down a little lower. And it's, and we've banned brain teasers. Now some can, some interviewers will still ask the questions. And basically what happens is when they get to our senior review, we just ignore those questions. So if you glue it on a brain teaser, don't worry, you'll be fine. That's good. That's good news. Talking about your senior review, you say in the book that as CEO Larry Page reviews every single hire you make, is that true? It is true. Wow. I mean, how many is that weak? How does that how does that work in terms of time scales, things like that? Well, the way works is so we've part of the reason the hiring process takes 45 days is we have a series of reviews at the end. There's a hiring committee that actually makes the initial hiring recommendation and the hiring manager doesn't sit on that committee. Then it goes to sort of we don't have a name for it actually, but sort of senior review. So for example, for sales and GNA, I and a colleague review everyone each week. And then all of those hires plus the technical ones get compiled into a spreadsheet, which goes to Larry, Google tricks spreadsheet with links to all the detail and he gets it every week and takes a look at it. Cool. So another, I think another common perhaps misconception and you can correct me if I'm wrong, it's a real prism that people say everyone wants to work at Google and you kind of mention that you have millions of applications. Does everyone want to work at Google? Or do you have recruitment challenges? Well, I like to think deep, deep down in their soul, everyone does. Of course they do, they may not know yet. But no, actually, you know, most of the best people are not even thinking about working someplace else because they're working at companies where they're doing great work and they're valued. So they're rewarded, they feel good about their work, they enjoy their manager, they're happy because high performers tend to do well and tend to be valued. So the trick is we actually have to invest a lot in going out and finding those people. And we try to sort of call them when they're having a bad day and get to know them over time and entice them. Cool. Do you know they're having a bad day? Is that Google's kind of data set somewhere? No, that's just a volume game. That's fair enough. I mean, talking about data, I mean, reading the book, you mentioned it at the start, it's very clear very quickly that data is vitally important through kind of all of your people strategy. What's unique about your approach, do you think, and is everything data driven? Not everything is data driven. Some things we just do because it's the right thing to do. So for example, we years ago introduced this death benefit where if you pass away, you know, when somebody dies, it's an awful, awful, horrible, traumatic thing, particularly when somebody dies sort of in the middle of their working career. And we introduced a death benefit, which we've got here in the UK as well, which is all your stock vests immediately, which is substantial. And your surviving spouse or domestic partner gets half your salary for the next decade. If you have children, the kids get $1,000 a month until they turn 18 or 24, depending whether they go to college or not. We did that purely because it was the right thing. And in fact, when we did it, we didn't tell people about it. Nobody knew we had this policy until two and a half years after we'd rolled it out to Google's. So it's not all data, but we do use data to sort of measure and test almost everything because so much of HR practice is, here's my gut, here's what I think, here's what, you know, this or that company did. And the reality is there's no evidence that that stuff actually works. Okay. So we're going to prove what does. Yeah, fantastic. Now, one of the questions that everyone comes on the show seems to you, I seem to seem to ask, never has an opinion on them. Can you replace a good recreaser with an algorithm, do you think, sort of leading on that data? I don't think you can't. I don't think you can't. There's a lot of startups that say they can't, but the reality is we, you know, we tried this. We did one day hiring processes in some countries. And what we found was that candidates would say, I don't trust your process. There's no way you could have gotten to know me in that time. Yeah. And so you need that human interaction. Okay. That's, that's, that's very good to know. You mentioned that your, that your division is people operations. Now that's opposed to HR. What's the difference between people operations and HR? Well, two things. One is we apply it, as you, as you're asking, a lot of data to what we're doing. So the operational part is, you know, trying to apply data to prove what we do, but also making sure every year we get more effective, more productive. And we have productivity goals. And it's quite tightly managed. But the other piece is that when I joined the company, it was actually titled, the title was changed to people off, purely because we believed the engineers would like that title more and think it was more incredible. Oh, cool. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah. Because I've seen it kind of pops up in other startups and things like that. I think it's a, it's a really interesting. Yeah. It's been cool to watch other people kind of take it and make it their own fun. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. So how would you summarize what makes Google say innovative? I think there's three things that drive innovation at Google. One is a mission that's meaningful. So organize the world's information that connects to people that resonates with people. The second is transparency. Because at Google, we share just about everything. You have access to our almost all of our code bases and engineer. You know everyone's goals. Our chairman shares the board of directors report every quarter with the whole company. And the third is voice. This idea that you as an individual in the company aren't just an employee. You're not just a cog in a wheel. You're an owner and you have a responsibility that comes with that and you help shape the company. Those three things are what drive innovation. And what's your favorite Google project or initiative? Have all the things that you're doing or working on? What's your favorite? My favorite right now is this program we're doing around unconscious bias. Oh, cool. And the idea behind that is most people aren't explicitly or consciously racist or homophobic or sexist or what have you. But all of us are biased without meaning to because we just like people who are like ourselves. That's just natural. You like people who like the same sports teams or what have you. And so it's this project and piece of work we've been doing for three years to make people aware of that unconscious bias. And it's had this wonderful, wonderful effect inside the company. Fantastic. You also talk a lot in the book about proving the culture, each strategy for breakfast. Talk is about the culture. You've got a chief culture officer as well. I mean, what's the sort of approach to the culture in Google? Well, it's actually really grassroots. So our chief cultural officer is a woman named Stacey Sullivan. She was employee number 50. And she also today leads people operations for sort of all our crazy things like Google X and Nest and Calico and our life extension business, things like that. And she is fantastic. And she's in charge of culture. But it's not sort of a formal title where what she says goes. What she's done is she's built this grassroots network of people in every one of our offices that she calls her culture clubs. And basically she finds people regardless of seniority who just get it. And she sort of taps them on the shoulder and says, when you see something fantastic, recognize it. And when you see something that's antithetical to how we believe, call people out on it. And it works beautifully. Fantastic. Final question. The future. What's the future in terms of people strategy for Google, for everyone, future of the workplace? What do you think people in people operations or people in HR in slightly more traditional companies should be looking towards and working on and anticipating? Well, I think if you're in human resources today, there's a choice you have to make. Do you want to create an environment that's kind of high freedom, Google like or like John Lewis, the grocery chain or not the grocery, the retailer out here, where people actually feel like they're owners and can take part and kind of shape the company. Or do you want to be more traditional? And you have to make a conscious choice because it turns out you can make money both ways as a business. You can have a business that just grinds people up and choose them up and spits them out. And because there's a lot of people who need work, but you then have to live with yourself. It's not what kind of person you want to be. So make a very deliberate choice and then treat people the way you think they ought to be treated. And that's going to mean things like being more generous sometimes than your economic suggests you could. But you will over time then attract the very best people because talents increasingly mobile, increasingly findable. And the best people will gravitate towards the former kind of company. And you can make money both ways. But you also want to do something you're proud of. Absolutely. Thank you very much for talking to me. It's a pleasure. Thank you. My thanks to Lazlo Bock. Lazlo's book, Work Rules, is out now and goes into a huge amount of detail on all aspects of Google's approach to people operations. He's giving all proceeds to charity. And I'll put a link to the book in the show notes. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or in Stitcher. And you can listen to past episodes at www.rfpodcast.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to the podcast mailing list to get exclusive content and find out more about future guests. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week. And I hope you'll join me. Bye bye. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]