Google’s Hiring Process Was Designed To Rule Out Toxic Hires – Here’s How (2024)

For years, Google has been consistently ranked as one of the best places to work, but with a 0.2% acceptance rate and 3 million applications a year, landing a job there is less likely than getting into Harvard. Despite an updated website with colorful infographics and six bulleted steps taking us through the process, a quick scroll down the page to start reading the fine print, and the simplicity unravels.

To curate the “diversity of perspectives and experiences” needed to build a company that works for everyone, the site tells us, “a fair hiring process is the first step in getting there.”

Well-measured metrics bring greater success

While the rest of the world has Google to answer their problems, Google has data – and they use it to drive improvement in all areas of their business, from user experience to human resources. Through theft, fraud, bullying, and sexual harassment, as well as the contagious nature of their behavior, one toxic employee can cost a company more than its top two performers earn. It stands to reason that the more interviews a candidate goes through, the better a hiring company’s ability to screen them for toxic traits that could hurt the company, but after some trial and error, Google relied on data to find a better answer.

In 2014, insiders described Google’s hiring as “an awful experience,” prone to take up to nine months, with people sitting for up to 25 interviews. Their soon-to-be CEO went through nine interviews before getting hired as SVP of Product Management. Three years later, they set out to see how helpful and predictive each interview was in adding to the hiring success rates of candidates and came up with the “Rule of Four.” Their research determined that four interviews were enough to predict with 86% confidence that someone was a qualified hire. Those returns started to diminish at five, which made nine (or 25) way too many to be worth anyone’s time.

Same questions asked across the board

Additionally, Google interviewers adhere to a model of “structured interviewing,” which involves a planned list of rigorous questions relevant to the position, not catered to an individual’s resume, and a scoring rubric. The model is hard to develop and takes a lot of effort to keep fresh, but research has found it to be a fair approach for a more diverse group that can increase the predictive validity of hirable candidates and reduce adverse outcomes. Each interviewer gives candidates a rubric score based on their answers to evaluate cognitive abilities, leadership, role-related knowledge, and a particular skill of “Googleyness” — comfort with action, ambiguity, and collaboration — to find the best fit.

But is a candidate with 12 high interview scores a better fit for the job than someone who scored high, but on half as many?

The research says no. Just as their 2017 data found a diminished return on interviewer feedback after four, their 2016 data also found that 95% of the time, panels of four interviewers made the same hiring decision as panels over four.

As an official part of its staffing decisions, Google says its “Rule of Four” reduces time-to-hire by an average of two weeks, while saving interviewers hundreds of thousands of hours and streamlining the process into a less stressful experience for candidates. Armed with a massive data library, Google keeps perfecting this process to weed out toxic employees and hold onto its crown as a top-ranked place to work. We may not all have Google’s data or their level of effort to put into keeping up a healthy workplace, but we can follow their lead where they’ve done the research and save ourselves resources and capital in the process.

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Tom Popomaronis is Executive Vice President of Innovation at Massive Alliance, a global executive branding agency. Tom co-founded Massive's Executive Leadership Branding program – which transforms world-class executives into contributing authors at leading publications.

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