Staffing Insurance: Big Data Hiring at Google
We wrote a blog post back in February on “Big Data in Recruiting for Staffing Agencies.” In the post, we discussed how data is being to analyze the hiring process including employee attrition, promotions and headcount data used to cut inefficiency in the hiring process. Today we’ll take a look at how one of the world’s most famous companies uses Big Data in their recruitment.
Google is one of the world’s leading search engines. It is only natural that they have a strong relationship with data. The New York Times recently sat down with Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations at Google to discuss how Big Data was being used in the leadership and management field.
Google conducted a study a year ago to find out if any of their employees were particularly good at hiring. They found zero correlation- it was completely random. It is incredibly difficult to identify intangible qualities such as leadership through data.
Google did find several things of note in the interview process. One was the type of interview questions they asked. Brainteasers such as “How many golf balls can you fit in an airplane,” were found to be a complete waste of time, and didn’t not aid in finding qualified candidates. They also found that GPAs and test scores as a worthless indicator of an individual’s potential.
While Bock touts the pervasiveness of Big Data, he notes that it does have its limitations. “Big Data — when applied to leadership — has tremendous potential to uncover the 10 universal things we should all be doing. But there are also things that are specifically true only about your organization, and the people you have and the unique situation you’re in at that point in time. I think this will be a constraint to how big the data can get because it will always require an element of human insight.”
What do you think about the use of Big Data in recruiting? How much should it be used?
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