Read the case study given below and answer the questions given at the end of the case study:

How Google chooses employees

Imagine being an employer of such high repute who has receives over one million job applications each year. How would you handle this seemingly endless flow of interested job seekers if it is your own organisation? Finding the best engineers, programmers, and sales representatives is a challenge for any company, but it's especially tough for a company growing as fast as Google. For Google, this is the very situation that it currently faces. In recent years, the company has doubled its ranks every year and has no plans to slow its hiring. More than 100,000 job applications pour into Google every month, and staffers have to sort through then to fill as many as 200 positions in a week.

Early on, the company narrowed the pool of applications by settling a very high bar on traditional measures such as academic success. For example, an engineer had to have made it through school with a 3.7 GPA. Such criteria helped the company find a manageable number of applications for interview, but no one had really considered whether they were the most valid way to predict success at the company.

Most recently, the company has tied to apply its quantitative excellent to the problem of making better selection decisions. Google turned to its highly talented and technical staff to take a different approach to hiring employees. In an effort to catch candidates who might otherwise slip through the cracks. Google has adopted some non-traditional criteria for assessing potential employees. First, it set out to measure which selection criteria were important. It did this by conducting a survey of employees who had been with Google for at least 5 months. These questions addressed a wide variety of characteristics, such as areas of technical expertise, workplace behaviour, personality, even some non-work habits that might uncover something important about candidates. For example, perhaps subscribing to certain magazine or owning a dog could be related to success at Google by indirectly measuring some important trait no one had though to ask about. The results of the survey were compared with measures of successful performance, including performance appraisals, compensation, and organisatjonal citizenship.

One important lesson of this effort was that academic performance was not the best predictor of success at Google. No single factor predicted success at every job, but a combination of factors could help predict success in particular positions.

From this information, Google compiled a set of questionnaires that were related to success in particular kinds of work at Google: engineering, sales, finance and human resources. Now people who apply at Google go online to answer questions such as "Have you ever started a club or recreational group?" and "Compared to other people in your peer group, how would you describe the age at which you first got into computers on a scale from 1 to 10?" The data are analysed by a series of formulas that compute scores from 1 to 100. The score then will predict how well the applicant is expected to fit into the type of position at Google.

Google is now considering activities that indicate candidate's leadership abilities, innovation, or creativity as a means to identify successful job candidates. These traits are identified through a series of survey questions aimed at finding out more about a job candidate than could be revealed in a traditional interview or resume.

Source: Adapted from Noe, R, Hollenbeck, J, Gerhart, B and Wright, P. (209). Fundamentals of Human Resource Management and Google Website http://www.google.com/about/jobs/

Answer all questions

Question 1

Based on the information given, would you say that Google's use of questionnaires is a reliable way of selecting its employees? Justify your answer.

(15 marks)

Question 2

Besides the questionnaires, what other selection method(s) would you recommend to Google? How would your recommended method(s) improve selection decision in Google? Explain.

(15 marks)

Question 3

Assuming Google Inc. has decided to send its two U.S-based employees to Malaysia for a two years assignment, what would be the key selection factors to determine the best two candidates for this global assignment?

(10 marks)