I don't need to sell you on the merits of Google, but here I go anyway: The company reported nearly $60 billion in revenue in 2013. That's nearly $16 billion more than 2012. Its stock is currently trading for nearly $530 a share. Chances are you've used one of its products today, probably multiple times. By any account, it's one of the most successful companies on the globe.
The tech behemoth could limit its hiring to name brand institutions from the Ivy League and its peers and be done with it but, like everything else Google does, it looks at hiring differently than everyone else and, again, like everything else Google does, it's more successful than just about everyone else. In fact, on some teams, as many as one out of every seven Google employees has no college education at all.
Google doesn't care what you know. It cares if you know how to think. Google doesn't care if you have leadership experience on your resume. It cares if you know when to step up and lead, and when to step back and follow.
There are five factors Google looks for in any potential new hire:
1) General cognitive ability. "It’s learning ability," said Google's senior vice president of people operations (seriously, that's his title) Laszlo Bock told the New York Times. "It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they’re predictive.”
2) Leadership. "In particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don’t care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power.”
3) Ownership. "“It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in.... Your end goal is what can we do together to problem-solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.”
4) Intellectual humility. This, Bock says, is where the value of a degree from pick-your-top-end-school diminishes. “They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved. ... What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’"
5) Expertise. “If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who’s been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: ‘I’ve seen this 100 times before; here’s what you do.’"
To translate this into hiring football coaches, perhaps your staff would be best served by challenging hiring norms, where three years as a GA and five years as a position coach means a coach is ready to become your coordinator because... he spent five years as an assistant and three years as an assistant. If your defensive line coach takes another job, maybe the best replacement spent the past five years outside of coaching. Or maybe the best replacement isn't a defensive line coach at all, but it's an offensive coach with an innate gift for connecting with and inspiring everyone he touches.
Here is, we thought, the most important paragraph in the piece.
“If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who’s been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: ‘I’ve seen this 100 times before; here’s what you do.’ ” Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, “because most of the time it’s not that hard.” Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they’ll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.
Let's again translate this into football terms. There's value in hiring an offensive line coach with 25 years of experience and every imaginable blocking scheme and technique emblazoned into his brain. But, then again, designing a blocking scheme isn't a taxing intellectual endeavor (sorry, O-line coaches), and most smart people can deduce the best way to block a stretch play, and the inexperienced person may even come up with a scheme no one else would have considered. But if that inexperienced coach is a superior motivator and is a joy to be around, don't worry about the blocking schemes, he'll learn those eventually.
If it works for Google, it can work for you.