How Google Chooses Employees - Essay Example

Running Head: Google’s Recruitment and Selection Google’s Recruitment and Selection Practices Introduction: Google is a rapidly growing organization. The speed at which it is growing is difficult for the HR department for the company keep pace with filling the new vacancies. The company has to fill around two hundred positions every week. It is a tough task alone, but given the the company’s HR department has to screen more than 100,000 jobs applications, the task becomes more complex. As a result, Google has to adopt several new and innovative ways to screen the human resource in the shortest possible time in order to start filling the jobs as quickly as possible. Problem Statements: Challenge 1: Google has to make sure that its recruitment and selection keeps pace with the growth targets. At any time it should not happen that there are vacancies that are not filled by highly efficient human resource. Challenge 2: Not only the pace is important, but the quality of staff is vital as well. IF the job vacancy is filled by average people, then they would not be able to keep up with the company’s growth policies and it would mean that the resources are lying idle. This is something that an organization like Google cannot afford. Challenge 3: Training people to make them a better resource for a large organization like Google. Challenge 4: Google needs to adopt recruitment and selection methods that are reliable and valid. Reliability refers to the instances that the several different measures of recruitment and selection yield the same results for Google. In other words, the selection methods should be such that they point towards a particular person or group of people. Validity means that the employees at Google are tested for what they can expect at the job. Solutions: Solution 1: The best option for Google to ensure that its recruitment policies are in line with its growth target is to use human resource forecasting method. It should plan that how many people would be needed in the company at the end of a particular time interval, say at the end of every quarter. It should then calculate how many people will be leaving the organization in that period. The estimation of people leaving the organization should come from past trends. Past trends will reflect the turnover rate of the company and what factors are causing people to leave the organization. It should then look at its future policies and should assess how many new recruits will be needed in the organization given the growth of the company. It should try to develop a model that will lead to as accurate calculation of people leaving the organization and how many will be needed every quarter. After it has been assess how many people will be needed, the company should being the recruitment and selection process in order bridge the gap between the number of people need in the organization and the number of people that are already working. Solution 2: The quality of staff can be maintained by looking at the academic records of people and also their extracurricular activities. The company should give certain weightage to various tools used in the recruitment process. For example, it should give certain weightage to the educational record, extracurricular activities, interviews and various tests. A good way to make sure that the staff hired is of highest quality is to use simulation test. Here the work related tasks should be given to people and they should be asked to solve the problems. The applicants who best solve these scenario based problems should earn a certain points. On the basis of all the assessments, all the applicants should be given a score. Only the top scoring people should then be called for assessment centers where their personality can be assessed further. Assessment centers should try to figure out the leadership skills and team-working abilities of people. Since Google usually delegates work in projects, therefore team working and leadership skills are of prime importance and they should get the maximum weightage. If an applicant does well in these tests, he should be considered for hiring. There can also be a final interview of the management chair or people from higher level management to assess whether the person fits with the future goals and aspirations of the company. Only the best quality human resource should reach this final level. After this the selected applicant can be notified and can be offered the job. Solution 3: Training is a costly expense. However, it improves compatibility of human resource with the organization. The company should try to develop a training program that should not only make people a better resource for Google, and should also be cost effective. Since work is divided in projects at Google. The teams should be composed in a manner that mixes talent with experience. In other words, new recruits should be paired with experienced employees of Google. This will not only provide the new talent with on-the-job training, but will also ensure that the work done is of highest quality. This will be cost effective and at the same time will help the new teams accomplish medium-level tasks and not only the mediocre or amateur level stuff. Solution 4: The reliability of validity of the recruitment and selection process can be maintained by using several testing method as described in the solution 1. There should be mixture of interviews, simulations, past records and other criteria to select people. This would solve the problem of reliability and content and criterion validity and would ensure that only best quality people are hired by Google. Conclusion: Google is a gigantic organization. It aspires to become the biggest organization in the world and that is not easy. It is particularly difficult for the HR department to keep pace with the company’s growth aspiration. Hence, the company should modernize its HR department in order to adopt the latest and best possible screening methods. It should also maintain validity and reliability in the process and at the same time should train the human resource to achieve its growth targets. References Blogs.payscale.com (2012) Google’s HR Practices Explained - Compensation Today. [online] Available at: http://blogs.payscale.com/compensation/2011/06/google.html [Accessed: 19 Mar 2012]. Losey, M. et al. (2005) The Future of Human Resource Management. 4th ed. New York: Wiley, p.114-119. Mathis, R. and Jackson, J. (2004) Human Resource Management. 4th ed. New York: South-Western Pbulisher, p.214-227. Personneltoday.com (2007) Googles human resources director sees growing pains as biggest HR challenge. [online] Available at: http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2007/11/19/43308/googles-human-resources-director-sees-growing-pains-as-biggest-hr-challenge.html [Accessed: 19 Mar 2012]. Strategic-hcm.blogspot.com (2008) HR for innovation / Google ~ HR to HR 2.0 and Human Capital (HCM). [online] Available at: http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.com/2008/05/hr-for-innovation-google.html [Accessed: 19 Mar 2012]. Read More