Are Google Interview Brainteasers Useless?

I can remember going on interviews when I was an MBA student at Harvard from 1993-1995.  Certain firms, particularly in the consulting industry, used to love using brainteasers as questions during interviews (along with the usual case interview methodology).  My first experience with such a brainteaser was the following question:  How many gas stations are there in the United States?   The questions allegedly helped the interviewer understand your thought process and your approach to solving problems.  Google, of course, became famous for using such brainteasers often during their job interviews.  One of my former students was asked at a Google interview:  "How many golf balls can you fit in this room?"  

Now, we hear from a senior executive at Google that such questions did not predict effectiveness on the job.   Here's an excerpt from an interview that the New York Times' Adam Bryant conducted with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google:

"On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.  Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.  Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult." 

I wonder how other firms feel about these types of brainteasers.  Will Google start a trend?  Will other firms finally ditch these silly questions?   I do think that Google's Laszlo Bok is correct - many interviewers are probably more interested in looking smart when they ask these questions, as opposed to truly learning something valuable.  One must also wonder if there's not some element of this line of thought:  "I went through this crucible; you should have to do so as well.  Let's see how you fare."  I'm sure some interviewers think this way when they consider asking one of these brainteasers.  

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Classic Mistake at a Job Interview

The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed Jennifer Boden, a human resources executive at Amazon.  They asked Boden a series of questions regarding Amazon's recruiting efforts.   Boden offered some keen insights.  I found this particular exchange with the interviewer worth stressing here:

WSJ: What tends to trip candidates up in interviews?

Ms. Boden: Most people will trip up when they focus on where they've been, the name, and they don't focus on what they've done. Or if they can't explain to us the process of how they delivered results.

Boden's observation confirms what I have seen many times over the years.  I often tell students to NOT make the interview a recitation of their resume.  The interviewer has read the resume!  He or she knows where you went to school, what your GPA is, where you interned in prior years, and what awards you have won.  What does the interviewer not know from looking at your resume?  That's the key question.  You have to talk about the major project you accomplished at your internship or the consulting report you put together for a client company as part of a business school course.  You should describe the major community service initiative you led at your university or the honors thesis research project that you completed.  An interview should be focused on telling several stories of hard work, organization, leadership, and achievement.  Be prepared to talk about what you did, what you learned, and how you can apply those lessons to this organization.    

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What Questions Do You Have For Me?

Source: glassdoor.com

You go on an interview, and you answer all the questions posed by the interviewer.  You think that you have performed quite well.  Then the interviewer poses the usual query:  What questions do you have for me?  You don't want to appear befuddled.  You need to have some good questions to pose.  What should you ask? 

Drake Baer has some good questions over at Fast Company. 

He suggests the following inquiries:

1. If I started tomorrow, what's the first project you'd want me to tackle?
2. What are the must-have personality traits for this position? 
3. What would you like to see more from in this position? 
4. Do you like it here? 
5. Why would I not be a fit for this job?

I think that these questions may prove quite useful.  However, I have a slightly different piece of advice to offer as well.  I always advise my students to conduct some field research prior to their interviews.  For a student interviewing at Bose last year, I suggested spending some time in the Bose outlet store in Wrentham, MA.  For a student interviewing this winter at Boston Beer Company, I suggested spending time examining how the company was merchandising and marketing its products at bars, restaurants, and liquor stores.  He really loved that suggestion - what fun research!  In each case, I recommended developing some questions based upon those field visits.   The students both impressed their interviewers with this knowledge of what was happening in the field (as opposed to just what they read on the website or in the 10K).   The questions proved far from generic; they could engage in a really substantive way with the interviewer.  They both got the job that they wanted! 

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Career Advice from Chris Stevens of Keurig

Source: Notre Dame

Last week Chris Stevens, one of the Keurig co-founders, gave a speech at the Bryant University Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization conference.   He offered a tremendous mix of practical advice and emotion-packed inspiration.   Chris has a fascinating background.  He played basketball at Notre Dame, worked at Proctor & Gamble and Anheuser Busch before joining with several others to make Keurig a resounding success.  He currently serves as an adjunct faculty member at Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business.  He also still serves as VP of Corporate Relations at Keurig.  Beyond his business accomplishments, Chris has done tremendous philanthropic work over the years.   He's also faced more than his share of personal adversity, including the death of his wife and two brothers in 2004. 

Chris offered some terrific practical advice for students searching for jobs.  He recommended that each student build a portfolio that they could take on job interviews.  That portfolio should include examples of the type of work that the student has done.  What projects have they completed at school or during an internship?  What presentations have they made?   Beyond simply putting the portfolio together, he recommended customizing it for the particular company at which a student was interviewing.  He told students to put the company name and logo on the front of the portfolio, and even the name of the executive with whom he or she would be interviewing.  Then they should offer to leave the portfolio with the interviewer.   It makes great sense.   Students (and all job applicants) need to be prepared to SHOW people what they have done, not just tell them about it. 

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Leader Selection Bias: Do We Choose Braggarts?

Paola Sapienza, Ernesto Reuben, Pedro Rey-Biel, and Luigi Zingales have performed a fascinating experiment with insights regarding how we select leaders. In their experiment, they asked MBA teams to select a leader to represent the group in a competition that involved quantitative analysis.  Everyone involved had performed these calculations two years earlier.  They asked each person to recall how they performed on these calculations in the past, and to predict how they thought they would do now.  Their results show that, "Women were selected as group leaders 33.3 percent less frequently than they should have been based solely on how well they did in the earlier competition."

 The scholars did not stop there though. They went further to understand why this result took place.  They examined three potential explanations:

"The first was a difference in the way men and women judge their own abilities. The second was a difference in how men and women describe their own abilities. And the third was a difference in how men and women deal with what the researchers call 'agency problems,' or how they 'respond to conflicts of interest between their own interest and the group’s.'”

What did they find?  Sapienza and her colleagues discovered that the second explanation proved most powerful.   Women tended to represent themselves differently than men.  While everyone tended to overstate their performance on the task two years earlier, men clearly exaggerated much more than women.  They were braggarts.  Shocker!   Sapienza takes it one step further though. She says that it might not be surprising that men are braggarts, but it is surprising that women don't account for that when casting their vote for who should lead the team.  She says, "The fact that men tend to overstate, that's not a surprise.  But if everyone knows that, why don't they just say, 'If men say 5, it must be 3.' There is some discounting, but it's very minimal." 

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Hire for Excellence... in any field

Fast Company has a terrific interview with Oren Jacob, former Chief Technical Officer at Pixar.  Jacob describes some of the key attributes of the Pixar culture and processes.   Among the many great tidbits, Jacob explains a crucial facet of the Pixar hiring process.  He calls it "hire for excellence." Here's the explanation:

When Pixar is evaluating potential hires they look for three traits: humor, the ability to tell a story, and an example of excellence. These aren’t unique qualities to assess in applicants, but how excellence is defined is not that common. It doesn’t matter what you are excellent at, just that you have reached a level of excellence. It’s important that you know what excellence feels like and what it takes to achieve it. It could be gardening, jujitsu, or cooking. The main thing is you’ve had a taste of excellence and will know how to get there again.

I really like the concept of hiring for excellence.   Developing mastery in a particular field or endeavor demonstrates self-discipline, work ethic, and perseverance.   It also means that individuals have probably engaged in the kind of deliberate practice that is required to excel.  Familiarity with that process of learning and development will suit them well when they have to develop new skills and capabilities.   Finding people who have achieved excellence in a range of endeavors also creates a workforce with incredibly diverse perspectives and experiences that they can bring to bear on any problem.  

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