In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

This interview with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. How is Big Data being used more in the leadership and management field?

A. I think there’s been a fairly recent confluence of the ability to crunch lots of data at fairly low cost, venture capital investments that support new businesses in this field, and changes in what people expect. Leadership is a perennially difficult, immeasurable problem, so suddenly people are saying, “Maybe I can measure some piece of it.”

Part of the challenge with leadership is that it’s very driven by gut instinct in most cases — and even worse, everyone thinks they’re really good at it. The reality is that very few people are.

Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert.

Q. What else has Google done in this field?

A. I have to preface the answer by saying that when we look at any data related to our people, we treat the data with great respect. Typically, we give people an option to participate in anything either confidentially or anonymously. The lesson for anyone looking at this space is that you need to construct this really powerful tent of trust in the people gathering the data and how they use it.

We’ve done some interesting things to figure out how many job candidates we should be interviewing for each position, who are better interviewers than others and what kind of attributes tend to predict success at Google. On the leadership side, we’re looking at what makes people successful leaders and how can we cultivate that.