When it comes to getting a new business off the ground – cash flow concerns, and building up a customer base may be two central focuses for start ups. But according to one of Google’s VPs, start ups may be missing a trick when it comes to the central factor that could determine the difference between failure and success.
The answer in a nutshell? Well, according to Urs Hölzle, Google’s eighth employee and current VP of Technical Infrastructure, hiring the right talent will help to lay the foundation for a prosperous business future.
Unfortunately, Hölzle goes on to argue that too few start ups are aware of this fact and as a result end up hiring the wrong people. Speaking to Techworld in Dublin last week he said:
“You let the pressure of meeting someone overcome your selectiveness and that’s a great way to die.
“Being really focused about a single, really talented person, might be much more important to your startup than two or three really average people.”
Throwing out traditional ideas of what constitutes the right talent
Hölzle outlined that Google seeks out new recruits from a number of places, the majority of which aren’t Ivy League or Red Brick institutions.
“Many of our best employees are from no-name places,” he said. “They didn’t go to Harvard, Stanford or Cambridge.”
He also went on to describe how candidates are generally subjected to four rounds of interviews to ensure they are the right fit for the search engine and computing giant. One interview stage will see candidates posed with a problem that they’ll need to solve.
“The main thing we’re doing is skills-based interview so it’s not what have you done but ‘Hey, here’s a problem – what would you do about it?’” said Hölzle. “You work with people and understand how they apply their skills to actual problems.
A recent ranking proved that Google must be doing something right in the employment stakes. The firm recently took the top spot in LinkedIn’s 2014 ranking of the 100 most in-demand employers.
Firms’ positioning in the rankings are based on ‘billions of interactions from LinkedIn’s 300M+ members’.
If you are keen hire the best talent for your business, Discovery Graduates can help with all stages of the graduate recruitment process including attraction, recruitment and retention.
