What makes a good employee?

<p>Today the New York Times has an interesting interview with a top HR manager at Google.

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One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

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<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The message I take away from this interview is that college students should seek opportunities to work on challenging problems. Companies are looking for problem solvers with good people skills.</p>

<p>Hmmm, seems like they did not ask if there were any differences in what works for different kinds of jobs.</p>

<p>But this did come out:</p>

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Makes you wonder how Google does so well. Their interviews don’t indicate an ability to choose a good match and their use of grades and scores wasn’t a good match either. I have no idea why any company would look at grades for an employee with experience anyway.</p>

<p>That’s exactly what I was thinking. OF COURSE I want gpa if that’s all the information I really have to go on. If they have 2 years of work exerience, OF COURSE I would rather know about that, and what they have accomplished since leaving school.</p>

<p>Google asks (in)famously hard interview questions–you’re there or you’re not–it won’t matter what your GPA was.
Given a bottom line for most businesses your GPA and test scores tell more about you than an actual interview.</p>

<p>Some people are always going to be bad employees and some are always going to be great employees. Most are good or bad depending on the situation they find themselves. By that I mean you could be great with one boss get a new boss work the same way and that supervisor thinks you are a poor performer. You could also perform certain tasks poorly and get moved to a different function and end up a star.</p>

<p>I have had interviewers (I am talking years after school, with a long, succesful track record) ask me my GPA and test scores, and I literally stopped the interview right there and walked out, because if they are asking questions like that the company isn’t worth much IMO (and in those cases, which I admit were relatively few, from the grapevine I heard my gut feeling was right, the company had that kind of uptight attitude, and they generally were known for high turnover, group think and suck upism, and only did well cause they kind of had a monopoly). I have heard that is common in Asian companies, that they make a big deal out of GPA, test scores and where you went to school long after you have been out working. </p>

<p>Funny part is, if Google had bothered to read the literature on the subject, they would have seen what they have concluded was known a long time before now. When I was doing my master’s in management back in the 1990’s, I took several courses in technical management and around HR, and the guy teaching the course wrote about 7 or 8 books on the subject, and they pretty much said that what Google and others do has no correlation. </p>

<p>Better yet, there is statistical data to show that kids coming out with the 4.0’s actually do worse then those whose GPA’s are less spectacular in enough cases to have some weight behind it.</p>

<p>I think the issue of school boils down to the fact that the way school works, it is often very irrelevant to real world situations, because its whole focus is on getting a good grade from the professor/teacher…so students spend a lot of time figuring out what the teacher wants and gives it to them. School is also very oriented towards lone wolf accomplishments, which is not true of the real world, most of what we do is working with others. The brilliant student who spends all their time in the library studying, who makes spectacular grades but otherwise has done very little, is going to have issues (have seen this more then a few times in my career). And school is a lot less ambiguous then the real world, the assignments you do, the tests you take, are mostly spitting back what the teacher gave you or doing problems the teacher assigned you with finite answers…whereas the real world is rife with ambiguity.</p>

<p>I know when I look at an entry level hire, I look at grades and classes to a certain extent, but I also look at a lot of other factors. What kind of groups has he/she been involved in? What kind of leadership did they display? I also look favorably on kids work experience, it is very very important because even the lowliest of jobs show the person has worked for people, worked for supervisors and coworkers, and had to show up at X time on Y day and so forth. </p>

<p>This topic comes up all the time in the music parents forum, about how if you go to a conservatory you aren’t gaining ‘real’ skills for the job force, and that perception isn’t all that true (among other things, speaking as an employer/hiring manager, music majors are often looked on quite favorably). Why? Because when you do music you have to have discipline to practice, to find the time to do it and find where to do it, too; you work extensively with other people in large group/small group situations (ensemble playing), you learn responsibility (you don’t get a paper in on time, you get a bad grade; you don’t prepare your part for Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, you make you group look like bad amateurs), dealing with difficult people , and more importantly, dealing with ambiguity, auditions and seating auditions and the like are ambiguous, it takes figuring out how to chart a path that isn’t conventional, and so forth. </p>

<p>The real answer is even with the best hiring practices, using state of the art theory, it often fails, could be great person in wrong role, person doesn’t fit the culture, person doesn’t get along with others, all kinds of things. Trying to use ‘science’ to predict future accomplishments like gpa, what school they went to, etc, [probably works worse then going by the opinion of the various people interviewing them and coming up with consensus. </p>

<p>The worse thing in the world? Don’t ever, ever let HR make any kind of hiring decisions, don’t do what some companies do, where HR interviews them first and has an absolute veto, all I can say is, we got some real freak shows interviewing where we scratched our heads, and found out later some really good people got bounced by the HR geniuses for stupid reasons. We had one HR person like that, who came out of an ivy level school and decided she would only allow people from that type of school, she didn’t last long when people found out what was going on.</p>

<p>I think the thread title asks a very good question. How does Google decide how well an employee performs on the job?</p>

<p>All those who are great test takers but who have lousy interpersonal skills should take heed. A couple years out of college, no one will care about your GPA. Here’s my opinion on the most important skill sets for real world.</p>

<p>1)Ability to get along with others
2)Ability to create and innovate
3)Ability to take direction and meet deadlines
4)Work ethic</p>

<p>Employers don’t care about GPA up to a point. They may not split hairs between a 3.8 vs 3.5, but find me an employer who doesn’t care about a 1.5 vs 3.5.</p>

<p>SOSOMENZA-your list would work- How about- perhaps a good employee in used car sales? Or the guy in land swamp sales? Or maybe take it up a notch and hedge fund manager or financial planner. Work ethics yes- but ethical maybe not.</p>

<p>RockyMH: #5)Ability to write a cogent sentence.</p>

<p>I think getting that first job may impact subsequent jobs, and yes, grades etc may affect getting first job. Agree 3.4 v. 3.6 may not be critical, but 2.2 is problematic.</p>

<p>Google is not a normal company. Most companies have no use for smart people, at least not for entry level hires. Google is one of very very few that can do something with their smart entry level hires.</p>

<p>A good employee does more than is asked.</p>

<p>@GMTplus, a 1.5 right out of college won’t be hired by me. However, 10 years of experience later with good references I won’t even know about it.</p>

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In most places, I don’t think a 1.5 will get you a degree. Maybe at Faber. </p>

<p>However, I work for an employer who doesn’t ask for GPA at all. You just need a degree. So apparently they don’t care about the difference between a 2.0 and 3.5. It doesn’t enter into the decision at all. And as I’ve posted on here ad nauseum, we hire lots of people.</p>

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<p>Be careful with this. There may be office-political situations where doing more can make someone else look bad. This may or may not be the desired effect.</p>

<p>There may also be situations a highly motivated employee may go beyond what is asked of him/her, but do something incorrectly, resulting in more costs to undo the result.</p>