[jia_min]

From the NYT's article quoting Laszlo Bock: "Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring."

Google made the classic mistake of using the interviewer as the predictor of interest. Meanwhile, decades of research has shown it's not who does the asking but how and what you ask. For example, structured interviews are about 50% more predictive of job performance (r = .51) compared to unstructured interviews (i.e., the way almost everyone interviews; r = .38).

So why did Google run this experiment when they had an army of Industrial/Organizational Psychologists who already knew the research? They wanted to collect their own data and test the theories on their own employees, which I encourage and applaud.

[wnissen]

Do you have a cite for this? I thought Google looked at interviewers and found that no particular interviewer did any better than any other, except, literally, one guy in a narrow sub-specialty. That's quite a lot different than concluding a 50% success rate is no better than chance, which I agree would be problematic at best, flat wrong at worst if the expected occurrence was low.

[jia_min]

Here's the NYT article where Laszlo mentions the "random mess" they found when they used the interviewer as the predictor and then subsequently mentions how they use structured interviews now instead: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

The interview correlations I cited are from Schmidt and Hunter, 1998: http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

My point is, it doesn't matter who does the interviewing - looking for people who are "good interviewers" is a unicorn chase because the vast majority of people don't have a magical ability to guess who's going to be a good performer pre-hire. Unfortunately, Amazon is making the same mistake with their "bar raisers": http://firstround.com/article/Mechanize-Your-Hiring-Process-...

Geez, you engineers don't seem to like to learn from each other.

[deciplex]

But Google doesn't do structured interviews. Not always, at any rate.

[jia_min]

The company line is that they use structured interviews. What actually happens in practice is often a different story.