How Bad Hiring Practices Can Slow Down a Company | Hacker News Reader

How Bad Hiring Practices Can Slow Down a Company

insidetech.monster.com

21 pointsmanimaran19 comments

From the article: "I’m picking on Google today because I ran into an article written by a recent Google applicant who walks the reader through an interview process that appears to be designed to exclude the most qualified applicants for a marketing job."

He concludes google excluded their "most qualified applicants" because they declined to hire someone who can't apply that complicated mathematical practice of division:

“Say an advertiser makes $0.10 every time someone clicks on their ad. Only 20% of people who visit the site click on their ad. How many people need to visit the site for the advertiser to make $20?” I froze. The problem sounded easy but I didn’t want to cause an awkward silence trying to solve it.

“Um…well, ok. So, 20 out of 100 people click on the ad. Every ten clicks make one dollar…and you need 20 of them…” That’s as far as I got before I resorted to guessing answers, none of which were right. I was panicking and I couldn’t do a thing about it. My nerves were taking over. Anna could sense this and began to give me hints. None of them helped my frazzled brain.

After five painful minutes the annoyed interviewer gave me the answer. “100 people make two dollars, and two times ten is twenty. The answer is 100 people times 10 which is 1,000 people.” She made it sound so easy; I felt like a moron. As if she enjoyed my misery, she immediately fired off another math problem.

FAIL.

You might be surprised how widespread the non-understanding of division is among the normal population. That includes the accounting profession, who have mastered addition and subtraction, and possibly multiplication as well.

It's not clear whether an understanding of division is really required for Google's marketing or not.

IIUC one of the key acronyms in the advertising world is “CPM”, the cost of an ad per thousand people in its audience. That word “per” is division.

Actually, it's a decimal point shift, which is a little easier than general division.

I couldn't agree more with you. The applicant did the right thing in reading up on the company, but just didn't have the skills.

For example, she knew how many ad placements GMail had, but it took her a lot of tries before she answered the question about how much Google makes from Gmail ads, and surely for the position she was applying for, the ability to make an educated guess (backed up with figures) at these things would be vital?

Her assumption that one out of four GMail ads gets clicked on seems wildly off-base; I thought that these days, a click-through rate of one percent is considered a smashing success. But of course if you know that every GMail page has four ads, and you assume that one quarter of the ads gets clicked on, the math for the rest of the problem gets a lot easier.

scenarios like this make me want to be a fifth-grade math teacher. maybe I could do a better job than this person's did.

If you can't solve a basic algebra equation you should be ashamed of yourself applying for any financial/math/cs jobs. I learned that in 5th grade (alas in another country though where school actually teaches you something).

All he had to do was write the problem down and solve for P: 0.10 * (P*0.2) = 20 ->>> result 1000 P eople.

Lesson learned for that interviewer. Lead with the math problem, then go over resume, boost Google, and end the call.

It's worse than that. This is a candidate for a marketing position at a leading technology company who, when she flunks an interview for clearly never having even attempted to do a calculation marketing people do constantly, writes a blog post making it clear that she thinks the interviewer was at fault.

Math illiteracy may not be a dealbreaker for a technology marketing role (hey, I've managed OK), but marketing illiteracy clearly is.

This person probably needs more experience at interviewing. There's absolutely nothing wrong with bringing a pad of paper and a pen to the interview. He should have solved the answer on paper rather than trying to think it through out loud.

This monster.com article picked a terrible example, since the person complaining on Business Insider wasn't so bright. But there's plenty of other articles out there to choose from if you're looking for critiques of the Google hiring process.

In my personal experience, Google was weak on follow-up and internal organization: "we'll get back to you in a week" was actually five weeks, and three months after that a different recruiter called me up to interview for the same job. I came away feeling like they didn't have their act together.

Of course, this was a few years ago.

I had a similar experience - from first phone call, to last (rejection) phone call was about 4 months.

Their actual interview process wasn't bad however. They never asked me any trick/puzzle questions. Everything was based on coding, algorithms and designs.

4 months, however, is inexcusable. If I was actively looking for a job at the time I would have given up on google long before they got back to me.

The Air Force fails most pilot candidates. Not because they aren't qualified; because they have an abundance of candidates. They have to screen somehow, and choosing folks that not only have the requisite skills or trainability, but also have additional perhaps unrelated skills is as good a screen as any.

Honestly, I read the article that this article mentions. To me it seems like the person who took the interview probably isn't cut out for google. Thats not necessarily a knock against the person, I'm probably not cut out for google.

I think the reality here is that there is nothing about googles hiring practices that is slowing them down to me it seems that google's hiring practices are very deliberate and they get exactly the type of candidates they want.

Every company has their own way of interviewing candidates. Some of the ways they measure a candidate might not make sense to an outside observer. I think Google has every right to hire with a math bias. If they are looking for analytical mindset in every position, then they should be asking math questions.

If only Google listened to Rob Enderle, their business might be as successful as Dell's MP3 player business (the last venture I remember Enderle being involved in).

Although I agree with most of the premises of the article, I was dumbfounded by the assertion that marketing is a creative role that doesn't require mathematical skills. Marketing is quite analytical in nature, and is not about dreaming up ad campaigns (that is advertising). So Google's sins in this case were: 1) an inexperienced interviewer; 2) a rude interviewer. Despite these flaws, Google accomplished its goal, which was to rule out a candidate with poor analytical skills.

I recommend chapter 5 of Parkinson's Law, titled "The Short List, or Principles of Selection":

Only a little thought is needed to convince us that the perfect advertisement would attract only one reply and that from the right man.

If not informed, you'll at least be amused.

(Search is your friend, but I recommend buying two copies of the whole book - you'll want a loaner. There are sequels, nearly as good.)

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