Read the article and answer the questions: Fortune magazine named Google the best of the 100 best

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Fortune magazine named Google the best of the 100 best companies to work for, and there is little doubt why. Among the benefits it offers are free shuttles equipped with Wi-Fi to pick up and drop off employees from San Francisco Bay Area locations, unlimited sick days, annual all-expense-paid ski trips, free gourmet meals, five on-site free doctors, $2,000 bonuses for referring a new hire, free flu shots, a giant lap pool, on-site oil changes, on-site car washes, volleyball courts, TGIF parties, free on-site washers and dryers (with free detergent), Ping-Pong and foosball tables, and free famous people lectures. For many people, it’s the gourmet meals and snacks that make Google stand out. For example, human resources director Stacey Sullivan loves the Irish oatmeal with fresh berries at the company’s Plymouth Rock Cafe, near Google’s “people operations” group. “I sometimes dream about it,” she says. Engineer Jan Fitzpatrick loves the raw bar at Google’s Tapis restaurant, down the road on the Google campus. Then, of course, there are the stock options—each new employee gets about 1,200 options to buy Google shares (recently worth about $480 per share). In fact, dozens of early Google employees (“Googlers”) are already multimillionaires thanks to Google stock. The recession that began back in 2008 did prompt Google and other firms to cut back on some of these benefits (cafeteria hours are shorter today, for instance), but Google still pretty much leads the ben- efits pack. For their part, Googlers share certain traits. They tend to be brilliant, team-oriented (teamwork is the norm, especially for big projects), and driven.

Fortune describes them as people who “almost universally” see themselves as the most in- teresting people on the planet, and who are happy-go-lucky on the outside, but type A—highly intense and goal directed—on the inside. They’re also super-hardworking (which makes sense, since it’s not unusual for engineers to be in the hallways at 3 a.m. debating some new mathematical solution to a Google search problem). They’re so team-oriented that when working on projects, it’s not unusual for Google team members to give up their larger, more spacious offices and to crowd into a small conference room, where they can “get things done.” Historically, Googlers generally graduate with great grades from the best universities, including Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. For many years, Google wouldn’t even consider hiring someone with less than a 3.7 average—while also probing deeply into the why behind any B grades. Google also doesn’t hire lone wolves but wants people who work together and people who also have diverse interests (narrow interests or skills are a turnoff at Google). Google also wants people with growth potential. The company is expanding so fast that it needs to hire people who are capable of being promoted five or six times—it’s only, the company says, by hiring such overqualified people that it can be sure that the employees will be able to keep up as Google and their own departments expand. *© Gary Dessler, Ph.D. 636 Appendix C The starting salaries are highly competitive. Experienced engineers start at about $130,000 a year (plus about 1,200 shares of stock options, as noted), and new MBAs can expect between $80,000 and $120,000 per year (with smaller option grants). Most recently, Google had about 10,000 staff members, up from its beginnings with just three employees in a rented garage. Of course, in a company that’s grown from 3 employees to 10,000 and from zero value to hundreds of billions of dollars, it may be quibbling to talk about “problems,” but there’s no doubt that such rapid growth does confront Google’s management, and particularly its “people operations” group, with some big challenges. Let’s look at these. For one, Google, as noted earlier, is a 24-hour operation, and with engineers and others frequently pulling all-nighters to complete their projects, the company needs to provide a package of services and financial benefits that supports that kind of life- style, and that helps its employees maintain an acceptable work–life balance. As another challenge, Google’s enormous financial success is a two-edged sword. Although Google usually wins the recruitment race when it comes to com- peting for new employees against competitors like Microsoft or Yahoo!, Google does need some way to stem a rising tide of retirements. Most Googlers are still in their 20s and 30s, but many have become so wealthy from their Google stock options that they can afford to retire. One 27-year-old engineer received a million-dollar founder’s award for her work on the program for searching desktop computers, and wouldn’t think of leaving “except to start her own company.” Similarly, a former engineering vice president retired (with his Google stock profits) to pursue his love of astronomy. The engineer who dreamed up g——mail recently retired (at the age of 30). Another challenge is that the work involves not only long hours but can also be very tense. Google is a very numbers-oriented environment. For example, consider a typical weekly Google user interface design meeting. Marisa Meyer, the company- NY's vice president of search products and user experience, runs the meeting, where her employees work out the look and feel of Google’s products. Seated around a conference table are about a dozen Googlers, tapping on laptops. During the 2-hour meeting, Meyer needs to evaluate various design proposals, ranging from minor tweaks to a new product’s entire layout. She’s previously given each presentation an allotted amount of time, and a large digital clock on the wall ticks off the seconds. The presenters must quickly present their ideas, but also handle questions such as “what do users do if the tab is moved from the side of the page to the top?” Furthermore, it’s all about the numbers—no one at Google would ever say, for instance, “the tab looks better in red”—you need to prove your point. Presenters must come armed with usability experiment results, showing, for instance, that a certain percentage preferred red or some other color. While the presenters are answering these questions as quickly as possible, the digital clock is ticking, and when it hits the allotted time, the presentation must end, and the next team steps up to present. It is a tough and tense environment, and Googlers must have done their homework. Growth can also undermine the “outlaw band that’s changing the world” cul- ture that fostered the services that made Google famous. Even cofounder Sergi Brin agrees that Google risks becoming less “zany” as it grows. To paraphrase one of its top managers, the hard part of any business is keeping that original innovative, small business feel even as the company grows. Creating the right culture is especially challenging now that Google is truly global. For example, Google works hard to provide the same financial and service benefits every place it does business around the world, but it can’t exactly match its benefits in every country because of international laws and international taxation issues. Offering the same benefits everywhere is more important than it might initially appear. All those benefits make life easier for Google staff, and help them achieve a work-life balance. Achieving the right work-life balance is the centerpiece of Google’s culture, but this also becomes more challenging as the company grows. On the one hand, Google does expect all of its employees to work super hard; on the other hand, it realizes that it needs to help them maintain some sort of balance. As one manager says, Google acknowledges “that we work hard but that work is not everything.” Recruitment is another challenge.

While Google certainly doesn’t lack appli- cants, attracting the right applicants is crucial if Google is to continue to grow successfully. Working at Google requires a special set of traits, and screening employees is easier if it recruits the right people to begin with. For instance, Google needs to attract people who are super-bright, love to work, have fun, can handle stress, and also have outside interests and flexibility. As the company grows internationally, it also faces the considerable challenge of recruiting and building staff overseas. For example, Google now is introducing a new vertical market–based structure across Europe to attract more business advertisers to its search engine. (By vertical market–based structure, Google means focusing on key vertical industry sectors such as travel, retail, automotive, and technology.) To build these industry groupings abroad from scratch, Google promoted its for- mer head of its U.S. financial services group to be the director of the vertical market for Europe; he moved there recently. Google is thus looking for heads for each of its vertical industry groups for all of its key European territories. Each of these vertical market heads will have to educate their market sectors (retailing, travel, and so on) so Google can attract new advertisers.

Google already has offices across Europe, and its London office had tripled in size to 100 staff in just two years. However, one of the biggest challenges Google still faces is gearing up its employee selection system, given that the company must hire thousands of people per year. When Google started in business, job candidates typically suffered through a dozen or more in-person interviews, and the standards were so high that even applicants with years of great work experience often got turned down if they had just average college grades. But a few years ago, even Google’s cofounders ac- knowledged to security analysts that setting such an extraordinarily high bar for hiring was holding back Google’s expansion. For Google’s first few years, one of the company’s co-founders interviewed nearly every job candidate before he or she was hired, and even today one of them still reviews the qualifications of everyone before he or she gets a final offer. The experience of one candidate illustrates what Google was up against. A 24-year-old was interviewed for a corporate communications job at Google. Google first made contact with the candidate in May, and then, after two phone interviews, invited him to headquarters. There he had separate interviews with about six people and was treated to lunch in a Google cafeteria. They also had him turn in several “homework” assignments, including a personal statement and a marketing plan. In August, Google invited the candidate back for a second round, which it said would involve another four or five interviews.

In the meantime, he decided he’d rather work at a start-up, and accepted another job at a new Web-based instant messaging provider. Google’s head of human resources, a former GE executive, says that Google is trying to strike the right balance between letting Google and the candidate get to know each other while also moving quickly. To that end, Google administered a survey to all of Google’s current employees in an effort to identify the traits that correlate with success at Google. In the survey, employees responded to questions relating to about 300 variables, including their performance on standardized tests, how old they were when they first used a computer, and how many foreign languages they speak. The Google survey team then went back and compared the answers against the 30 or 40 job performance factors they keep for each employee. They thereby identified clusters of traits that Google might better focus on during the hiring process. Google is also moving from the free-form interviews it used in the past to a more structured process.

Questions
12. What do you think of the idea of Google correlating personal traits from the employees’ answers on the survey to their performance, and then using that as the basis for screening job candidates? In other words, is it or is it not a good idea? Please explain your answer.
13. The benefits that Google pays obviously represent an enormous expense. Based on what you know about Google and on what you read in this text, how would you defend all these benefits if you were making a presentation to the security analysts who were analyzing Google’s performance?
14. If you wanted to hire the brightest people around, how would you go about recruiting and selecting them?
15. To support its growth and expansion strategy, Google wants (among other traits) people who are super-bright and who work hard, often round-the-clock, and who are flexible and maintain a decent work-life balance. List five specific HR policies or practices that you think Google has implemented or should im- implement to support its strategy, and explain your answer.
16. What sorts of factors do you think Google will have to take into consideration as it tries transferring its culture and reward systems and way of doing business to its operations abroad?
17. Given the sorts of values and culture Google cherishes, briefly describe four specific activities you suggest it pursue during new-employee orientation.