Former Google HR Head Reveals the Truth behind Google's hiring success!

0:00Google called. I remember the interview process took six months. I flew out to California three times. I had 24 interviews. 24? 24 interviews. How many people were they at the time? 3 ,000 when I started interviewing, and by the time I started the job, 5 ,000 people.

0:20What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty-gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change? I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

0:57Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of TruthWorks. I'm Jessica Neal. I'm here with my partner in crime for a couple episodes, Bob Sutton. And hi, Bob. How are you? I am good. I'm good. Okay. And we have a wonderful guest today who is a friend of mine and a friend of Bob's. And his name is Laszlo Bock. And I'm sure many of our listeners know him already. But he is the father of people analytics. He was the head of HR at Google and became famous from that. He wrote a wonderful book, Work Rules, which Bob just pulled up. He was the founder of a company called Humu, which I personally know a little bit about since I got involved with Humu with you, Laszlo, as well.

1:42But welcome, Laszlo. We're so excited to have you and talk to you about many a things. Tell everybody what I didn't tell them about you that they need to know about you. Well, first, it's so fun to be with you guys. It's always great to see friends, and you two are just wonderful, wonderful, super fun people. So I'm happy to be here. I guess the only other thing you left out was that I was briefly ranked number one in the world for Daily Kills. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. You're pretty significant. Yeah. You're a gamer. But one game in particular, Assassin's Creed. No, lots of games, but that was the only one.

2:22That was the one that you got really good at. Yeah. But I have an unorthodox approach to playing video games that are ranked in that I don't hire people to play them for me. That's a little unusual in the tech industry these days, but I'm old school in that sense. Okay, so you actually play it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's weird, right? I forgot that stat about you. That's a good one. And you're a father. Yep, yep. Three amazing daughters, the oldest of whom just graduated college and started a new job. And she actually, though, she's in New York City. She actually asked that I not comment on her LinkedIn posts and not say anything because, and this is very real.

3:01She doesn't want anyone to have the impression that I helped her. Right. Like kind of withers. And in fact, I did not. I probably hurt her in my efforts to coach her. So I can't reveal her identity, but she's in New York. And then a daughter who's about to be a junior in college and a daughter who's about to be a junior in high school. You're going to be an empty nester soon. You're that close. Yeah. And that's why I'm pleased to announce in two years I'll be starting my new podcast. Well, you have your first two guests right here. Exactly. We'll be on it. Well, just having had children who are a little bit older, it's amazing how often they'll come back for a few months and then leave again.

3:41So don't close down shop yet. Well, that's my hope. That's my hope. And actually, the middle one's spending the summer at your institution. So she's having a great time there working with one. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. My 32-year-old daughter just is going to be a master's student at Stanford next year. And she lives in San Francisco. So we're going to be seeing a lot of her since our house is close to campus. I love that. Well, Laszlo, you have such a, you just have had such an amazing career journey. You've done so many things. I want you to take people through it for a little bit. But I personally love, you know, just how you got started and then how you ended up at Google.

4:19And then I think everybody's just very curious about like Google in the early days. And you were there doing all of this innovating in the people space, which really hadn't really been innovated in. So tell us a little bit about like your early career and then early days at Google. So my early career was like, if you looked at my resume, a total mess. And that's why it's not detailed on LinkedIn. I started, I had my first job when I was 14. Didn't know about corporate America. My family came to the U.S. as refugees, so we didn't know about the big companies and you go to business school and all this kind of stuff.

4:54We didn't know what colleges were ranked certain ways. And so I was lucky enough to get mentored by a few people who eventually led me to business school and then to McKinsey and Company where I did consulting. And after four years of that, I realized that the single thing that had frustrated me the most in my career was the disconnect between the values that leaders talked about and what they actually lived. and it drove me crazy it it just bugged me it felt like hypocrisy and drives me crazy too well you're like one of the most values driven people i know i mean it must yeah but after four years of consulting i decided to go into hr and i remember my cohort there were 24 of us that started in that office and by the time i was leaving we were down to four of us left because it was this up or out culture and mckinsey really does that five years at mckinsey's a long time yeah it's a long time it's a long time but they thought i was nuts they were like why are you going to hr you're throwing your career away and my calculus was well i'd never be a ceo or you know a vp of strategy or you know big fancy venture capitalist or anything but i'd get to work on the issues i cared about the most and i was living in connecticut and the two best academy hr companies at the time were pepsi and ge so i cold called a bunch of people at both one person and GE got back to me.

6:10And six weeks later, I started a job in GE Capital. And that's when GE was good. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. They were like cutting edge for people's strategy at the time. They were like the place to learn. Yeah. Both to, I mean, not just HR, but to become a CEO. Like they famously were the school for CEOs. Yeah, I've been lucky. I've been able to get into companies just before the brand kind of. well no correlation with you of course well i don't know maybe it was my fault or maybe because i left i don't know the um so i spent three years at g capital and uh in two different hr jobs in two different businesses and then google called i remember the interview process took six months i flew out to california three times i had 24 interviews and 24 24 how many people were they at the time?

7:05Like 3 ,000. So they actually, there were 3 ,000 when I started interviewing. And by the time I started to the job, 5 ,000 people. So that's how quickly things are growing. Jeez Louise. Yeah. So Lazo, did you report to Shona Brown? Was she there that early? She got there a year or two before me and I reported to her for a year. And then Eric asked me to report directly to him. Eric Schmidt, CEO. So Shona Brown was a PhD student in our program and a sign of how long I've known her, I once loaned her$500. And she's probably a billionaire by now. She did. Okay, good. She did, but I loaned her$500.

7:41So that's how long I've known Shona. That's amazing. That's amazing. Well, she was fantastic. So she was amazing. Before I started, and actually even when I started, the hiring was super focused on pedigree. And so the story I was told was when they went looking for a head of HR, They wanted somebody who was a Rhodes Scholar and a McKinsey partner and a PhD from Stanford or Harvard. And Shona was all those things. Yeah, Shona was all three of those things. But then she would only, I was told, she would only take the job on the condition that she actually got business operations, got to create and stand up what actually was one of the first business operations teams on the planet, too.

8:20I mean, this was right around when like Cerberus was building up their internal operations group and people didn't really have biz ops teams. So she kind of pioneered that. and then uh yeah then i came on and uh you know got to play in that sandbox yeah so then you you start and it's like 5 000 people is it just chaos or like what what is it like i mean yes and no there was there was already a lot of discipline around certain things like for example in on the product side uh no product lot there were actually this was actually super instructive for me one of the ways Larry and Sergey maintained control of the company as it scaled.

8:56And I don't mean in a nefarious sense. I mean, one of the paradoxes of becoming an executive is your voice carries more weight, but you feel less of it. You feel like people aren't listening. It takes longer. And so you have to have these kind of choke points, I believe, to manage the business. So Larry always had to approve product launches and hires. So no one could get hired without his personal sign-off. I remember this. Yeah. So there were structures where things were very tightly managed, but then underneath it, yeah, complete chaos. In a very positive sense, though, people could do whatever they wanted.

9:29There was a tremendous amount of trust. Like there were not headcount budgets. There were not financial budgets. There were kind of no controls. Like you kind of go start up an office if you have a good idea and you're excited and you're an engineer, you go start an office. So it was pretty amazing to join that. And then underneath that, though, there were some things like within the hiring process, for example, there were two things that on day one, I was like, oh, this this feels wrong to me. And so there were sort of some ingrained bad habits on top of some incredibly good instincts and practices.

10:01But like explain those tests. So one of them was the way hiring worked for almost my entire time. There was the senior executive team. And so there'd be maybe a dozen of us. And at any given time, there'd be three or four of us on the product sales and GNA side, general administrative side, and then four engineering execs. And we'd split into two groups and every week we'd review every offer before it got extended. And so how many offers was that like a week? I think it peaked at about 350. Yeah. It was pretty fun. When I started, it was probably around 40 or 50 a week and then it climbed quite a bit.

10:42Yeah. Yeah. So there was one candidate and every candidate that was reviewed. So by the time you get to this step, you have a 40 to 80 page dossier on every candidate. Right. And it's where they went to college, where they went to grad school, what their grades were, their SAT score, detailed references, the results of average candidate had sort of 15 to 20 interviews. So all that feedback, hiring committee feedback, hiring committee review feedback, backdoor references, which is, you know, you give us your references and then we work our own network to figure out what you really say. So this huge dossier and this candidate comes in, green light across the board, Stanford master's degree, Stanford undergrad, straight A's, high SAT scores.

11:25And it was a woman candidate and her packet gets reviewed. This is on my first day, like literally five hours into the job. and one of the people reviewing one of the other senior executives looked at it and said oh this person majored in human biology only idiots study human biology and rejected the candidate and on top of that right like there were very few black candidates it was disproportionately male all those things so that was like one thing where i was like this does not look good this does not feel good and that then turned into a kind of secret two and a half year project to change the we hired work called Project Cerebra, where the cool thing there was to make sure it was a valid scientific experiment, we actually hired 200 people that Google had rejected to see how they performed.

12:09So it was super fun. How did you get away with that? How did you do it? So the short version is we developed a bunch of scientific research led by a guy named Todd Carlisle, Dr. Todd Carlisle, who went on to be a head of HR a couple of times after Google. But we figured out a few questions we could ask that predict how someone would perform at Google, we thought. But in order to actually test whether they're predictive, the problem is you've trained it on people who are already hired by Google. So what you need is people who are not hired by Google. So every candidate for most of the jobs on the online forum had to answer five to 10 questions and that generated a cerebral score.

12:46Anybody who got above a 70, we should hire. And so what we did was we found there were two job categories where we were hiring thousands of people a year. And because the way hiring worked, you would just interview, but you wouldn't really interview the people for your team, right? So this was software engineering and online sales. So lots of people, managers and individual employees interviewing, a bunch of people coming in, they all start on different teams. So we decided to hire a hundred, well, I decided, I didn't tell anybody except, so Todd knew and one other person knew. And we said, okay, find people, we're going to find 100 people in engineering and 100 people in online sales who had cerebral scores above 70 and were rejected by a hiring process.

13:31Okay. And mostly they're rejected because of pedigree or? All kinds of reasons. The interview didn't go well, interview feedback. We didn't, I don't actually, I did not formally look at why they were rejected. But remember too, the hiring process was a lot more biased at the time. So there was a lot of, you know. So that's one of the most, First of all, you're overcoming what they call survivor bias, which is that you think you have all the best people because you don't look at the rejects. But the other thing, and we've talked about elements about how you got rid of friction in the hiring process at Google before.

14:04In fact, I've talked about them over and over again. But I did not realize the degree to which you got ahead by doing constructive defiance. And the beautiful thing is at Google, probably it was okay in some way to do that in that era. Wasn't it? No? um how much trouble would you maybe maybe not if he was an engineer maybe but maybe not with hiring because hiring hiring was like so sacred it was right it was kind of sacred well for larry when i yeah when that's it when yeah so you didn't get fired though for that no but so the trick was like once you hire these people you need to wait a year and a half to see how they perform right and like you can't just say you know you need because you know the first you're acculturating you're getting used to it you move teams a little bit and i do remember being incredibly nervous when i went to the executive team and said okay we no longer need to and it wasn't just me at this point it was like todd and some other analysts who'd like had the statistics and data behind it as well they were like look gpa is not predictive where you went to school is not predictive sat score is not predictive and therefore we should remove all those things from the hiring process yeah and then the question was well how do you know i said well i mean it was risky right like i i very i could have been fired yeah absolutely yeah but to your point about what was the response when you told them how like what would they say well so it was it was i'd say grudging acceptance okay that's not bad yeah no it was it was and we we implemented everything at like the 90 level so for example the marketing team kind of still said like well i don't care i'm still going to look at where they went to college okay well for the other 90 we're not gonna find that's victory um yeah but it was i had the benefit of it being a data-driven culture so if you showed up with enough data and you argued it and and by the way showed it to lots of people right transparency was a big part of it not just the executive team but engineers and all the hiring committees and things like that there was a whole road show of like terror partner methodology say what you know go after it and they kind of concluded okay this is this is that you guys are right yeah and so we got rid of that I love that, Lesley.

16:09That is a fantastic story. And, you know, I mean, it just pedigree doesn't matter. Your test scores don't matter. And we've learned that over time. And I mean, the thing that I love about that story is that you weren't just going qualitatively saying, I think this is wrong. Like you came, you did a whole test and you came with data and proved it. So pedigree doesn't matter for actual performance, but it sure does matter for opportunity. Sure.

17:07like it was hidden in my appointment package right i love it oh wait so i so two two things one is three one is that's amazing and i'm glad you got that offer before the days of organizations were sending offers right number two i don't know anything about humbio so i assume this is as good a major as anything else number three the person who said that held a phd from stanford of course they did of course yeah so it wasn't like some Yale Harvard thing it was like somebody from you know right so yeah yeah all kinds of bias so you're in this big role like basically charting new territory not only for like the people function but for a category defining company itself, like one of the most famous companies in the world.

18:00There's not one person that doesn't know what Google is. So what was that like? Did you even realize how big of a job you were in? No, no. Oh my God, no. So again, I benefited from bias. They wanted pedigree. And so I'd worked at fancy companies, had a fancy MBA. There's no way I would have even been considered without that. And then I was 10 years younger than anyone else on the executive team. I mean, they weren't old either. They were like in their 40s, right? So I was 32 or 33 when I got the job. And, you know, I don't think until you look back in retrospect, you really realize. But internally, it felt like the business could disappear at any moment.

18:42And it's hard to imagine now with the monopoly findings and the scale and the ubiquity of Google. But, you know, when Facebook came along, we viewed Dropbox as a crazy strategic competitor, Airbnb, Twitter, all these companies, plus every random startup. And then you just bought them. When we could. Well, I mean, YouTube, double click, Google Maps, Android. Yeah. And they're still doing it, right? I mean, that's a strategy. $2.3 billion for character.ai and so on. But the other piece that was really interesting was even internally, when the business was, once we got into sort of a rhythm of forecasting and projecting things financially, and we're more structured about that, there was still a sense that the revenue could go away at any time.

19:27So for example, every summer, business would slow down, ad revenue would slow down. And so what would happen in my world was, we'd make our hiring plans in November of the prior year, we'd ramp up a career, oh, we're going to hire 10 ,000, 15 ,000 people this year, then revenue would slow down versus projections in the summer. And the executive team would freak out and say, no, no, we got to pull it back, pull it back, stop hiring. So meanwhile, you know, you have like tons of recruiters ramped up, all these candidates in pipeline like this. It's a factory that you're running. And then the boss says, hit the brake.

19:56So you pull back hiring, slow down with the candidates to close jobs that were open. And then business would pick back up in the fall. And I kid you not, this was a mystery why this was happening until three years after I got there, somebody on the product team or the finance team, the analysis was like, oh, wait, revenue slow down every summer and it's because people go outside more and so they're not on their computers as often they don't click on ads it's a seasonality thing yeah yeah yeah but it was like internally that it was this and now with mobile it's a little different because people are on all the time but you to your question about did you know like it always felt it probably still feels like at any day it could all go away because it on the one hand there is kind of lock-in but But it's not locked into the same way that like, you know, you have a refrigerator and you're going to have it sitting in your kitchen for 10 years.

20:47Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I think we felt very similarly at Netflix. Like, you know, somebody was always nipping at our heels and like it could be gone in a minute. And that sense of, I don't know, urgency just really changes things from a culture perspective. Like you just feel like you have to do it today. Yeah. Because if not, somebody else is going to do it, you know. Yeah. And it gives you tremendous, I think, autonomy for everyone in the company because it's like, this is my thing. I got to build it. I have to make sure this thing is working or it all falls apart. It's an amazing thing to get to be a part of at some point in your career.

21:25Yeah. Bob, what were you going to say? Well, I was going to say is just, and, you know, both of you have talked to all sorts of founders and executives, but to me the hallmark of a culture, once it loses that, that's when I start worrying about it. Because so Brad Bird, the Academy Award winning director of The Incredibles, like about, I don't know, 15 years ago, Huggy Rau and I interviewed him. And he was very animated sort of guy, literally. Like he's like a cartoon character. And he was, so relentless restlessness. That's what I want. That's why I got fired at Disney. They weren't relentless.

22:01That's why, I think that's why he went to Pixar. And I think it's why he left Pixar because they lost it. And I think we all know what that is. It's just that feeling that I'm paranoid and things are never quite good enough. And when people start saying, well, after all, I'm Stanford. After all, I'm Google. and that just that's when I get that's when I get in trouble yeah that's when I get nervous it's a great point that's what we're gonna say I'd love your take actually both your takes as practitioners but also as scientists so Bob you're describing that as something you lose like sometimes you have it sometimes you look and then you lose or sometimes it comes and goes but my question is so the 101 freeway which connects like San Francisco to the the peninsula and Silicon Valley and that famously has all these terrible billboards for startups you've never heard of.

22:49Like, it's just like terrible advertising. Like the copy is bad. The imagery is bad. And I would drive when I was, when my kids were younger, we'd drive up and down the 101. Sometimes I'd like look at it and I'd say this about a lot of things. I'd say like, that is somebody's best work. Can you believe it? That this is somebody's best work? Like there's one billboard right now that says compliance that doesn't suck too much because SOC2 is a compliance thing. But the thing is in those like six words or whatever, compliance that doesn't sock too much so it's a terrible pun terrible but they use three different fonts and it's like it just it hurts your eyes to look at right and it's somebody's so the question is my question is and again this was like jonathan rosenberg who's had a product for years and he was google's first head of product and he's a remarkable guy and has exceptionally high standards and one of the things i learned from him and this is the question is this correct like through his lens and looking at things like that is it possible a bunch of people just don't even know what good looks like that like you know they they don't know and so you're talking about the culture having it and losing it but some is some of it just innate in the people if you like get enough of the wrong people they don't know what good looks like they don't and you're doomed what do you think i think that there's a point there and i mean you and i i think know this it's like and if you wanted to use it through the lens of hiring it's a bunch of people hiring people that aren't great because you've never seen what a great person looks like and then you show them what that great person looks like they're like oh that's what you mean and then they'll never hire those sort of average people again they'll hire great people so here's the thing whoever did that billboard they've seen other billboards right right that's true they have a tv they have a they have a phone they've seen advertising right this poor person i don't know and then someone approved it, right?

24:42Well, I don't know, maybe. Maybe not. Like, that's up the chain. Like, somebody, like, is like, well, this is, this is great. We want the world. So, Lazo, this is slightly off topic, but, I mean, the summary is, I think you need both talent and persistence, and persistence when you're not talented at something is really a problem. But there's sometimes a problem, which, by the way, both Google and Stanford have suffered from at various times, and I call it spending money is a substitute for thinking. And I think that's what happens with some of those billboards and sometimes buying entire companies too.

25:18Or maybe launching Google Glass might be an example of that. And I think you all, you know what I'm talking about? Netflix seemed much more disciplined about that stuff than some other companies and universities actually. Yeah, I think, you know, just speaking of like buying companies and things, I think Reed had done a little bit of that before Netflix at Pure where he, you know, a very successful company, but it was just so painful. He's like, I'm not going to grow through acquisitions. That's not how I'm going to grow. I'm going to build. I'm not going to buy. And, you know, I think it was just a conscious decision.

25:54Also, he never wanted a sales team again. I'll never have a company that has a sales team. And we never had a sales team at Netflix and we didn't really need one. We just needed marketing. you know. That's really cool. I love that. Yeah. So I mean, I guess good that he got to learn these things, but you know, it's not all founders, you know, get to do multiple starts, which brings me to you because you are also a founder of a company that I was incredibly passionate about, still am, and the company's called Humu. Now it's part of Perceptix. But tell us like a little bit of like transition from Google CHRO to founder what's that like well so in Silicon Valley so so now I spend time with like certainly lots of HR folks but also as you do with the venture capitalists and so on and somebody once said you should never invest in somebody coming out of you know Google or Facebook or Microsoft or whatever on their first startup but you should let them learn the lessons about how it different.

26:56And I was lucky because we, first of all, had great investors like you, Jessica. Thank you. But both my parents, and maybe it's something about being an immigrant, they were both entrepreneurs. So my dad had a job. We came to the US, he got a job at an engineering firm. And two years later, my dad's name is Paul. And he's amazing. He'd completed some big project, his boss invites him into the office or the boss's boss. And the boss says, Paul, you know, I'm so impressed, blah, blah, blah, I'd like to give you this special bonus. And he gave him a check for I think like$10 ,000, which in 1976, that's like a year's salary, right?

27:29That's amazing. And my dad, who was wearing a suit, because that's what you did at the time, he took the check and he put it in his coat pocket and he said, thank you very much. I'm resigning. And he started his own engineering firm that he built and ran for 30 years. And my mom also, she was a teacher. She came here, got an MBA, had her own like small, very small consulting firm. And along the way though my parents were constantly trying things at one point our family was the largest importer of frozen egg rolls yeah in california egg rolls frozen egg rolls colonel lee's frozen egg rolls okay who doesn't love egg rolls i love egg rolls because we had friends who were chinese in the neighborhood yeah we weren't big like this was like literally you like load up the station you take the station wagon down to like the packing house there's a big freezer that was unloaded from a shipping crate, you load it in the back of your car, and then you drive around Southern California delivering boxes of frozen egg rolls to Chinese restaurants.

28:25But I was lucky because I had this model of when you start something, number one, it's 24-7. And as a kid, that wasn't great. But as an adult, it was great to have learned that lesson. Number two, the responsibility is totally different. I thought being an executive at a big company, I felt tremendous responsibility. but when you start something basically you you make something up right you you write a deck and then someone gives you in our case 10 million dollars like 10 years ago and then people quit their jobs like give up everything we have people who took 95 pay cuts to come work for us and the pressure to like provide for them and and honor your commitment and promise to them is enormous so completely completely different and then you'll appreciate too the last thing that was different was our first deal was a$50 ,000 revenue deal, which for a brand new starter, that's a good size deal.

29:19And I got the check, like a physical check and in the mail. And we were looking at it going, I can't remember that last time at Google, a number this small came across my desk. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like everyone, everyone's making millions of dollars in compensation. We're spending billions of dollars on stock. We're buying companies like$50 ,000, up like a really big orientation yeah but but it was amazing and then so amazing i did it twice yeah so let's talk because we talked we were talking about this in the beginning when we were just chit-chatting uh before we started recording but the i want to get more into the founder but the the role that you and i played and have played in companies being the chro it has changed dramatically over the years.

30:06And this isn't me whining and complaining. I literally think it is the hardest C-level job there is. And it is one. Well, wait, having been a CEO, I can tell you it is much harder. Yeah. And so when you are the talent strategist, the HR strategist, compliance risk, all of those things. Then you're the chief medical officer. You're the chief diversity officer. You're the COO. And now, as we were discussing, you're the AI strategist. And the other thing that I think is, I just want to say fucked up about this role, is that everybody thinks they can do your job. Nobody questions you. They don't question the chief product officer the way they question you.