Below is what I learned from this talk; almost all of them are not my words but Laszlo's. Bolded texts are personal key lessons from this talk.
1. set a high bar for quality … and never compromise
- no names before resume screening
- 4 criteria of a Google interview
- general cognitive ability: how well someone can solve problems, how curious they are, and how fast they can pick new things up
- leadership: no titles and management necessary; emergent leadership!
- when they see a problem when they are a member of a team, and they see the problem and step in, help solve the problem but just as importantly as soon as the problem is resolved, they step back out; they are willing to relinquish power
- Googleyness: are they comfortable with ambiguity, do they have intellectual humility (i.e. able to say, "I was wrong" when presented with new data and change their positions), bring something new and different to our mix/organization
- role-related knowledge: do they actually have skills and knowledge to do the job we’re hiring them for
- provide clear criteria to look for
- define what best, mediocre and bad examples
- structured interviews: consistent set of questions
- situational questions: hypothetical questions ("what would you do, why did you do that, what else would you do, why would you take other actions")
- behavioral questions: describe prior achievements
- "give me an example of an incredibly difficult problem you solved, tell me more"
- what candidates consider challenging or exemplifying that attributes and how to directly relate back to the job
