Hiring Is Not About GPA, IQ or the Degree Change Your Thinking to Significantly Improve the Impact of Selection Just read an article about Google and why they don't care about hiring the top college graduates. I really enjoyed the comments by Google's Head of People Operations, Lazlo Bock, because he espouses a position that I have preached for years. Google has moved away from screening based on GPA, brand name schools and other typical screening credentials. Instead they focus on learning ability and how candidates have handled particularly challenging problems in the past - learning on the fly and the ability to process on the fly. They don't limit their search for people who only have college degrees but also look for people who have successfully navigated through life without a degree. They look for people who have failed gracefully and learned from that failure. For Google, the ability to learn is more important than IQ. Many hiring managers set too stringent knockout factors at the start of the process - factors that often have little relationship to future performance and potential. One of the biggest culprits is over-emphasizing technical knowledge that can be learned in a short period of time in the new job. There is a big payoff for companies that promote from within. This opportunity is lost if you ignore a new hire's future potential and only select with a focus on immediate job performance. The result is a pipeline of internal talent that is limited in its ability to adjust to change and to take on broader and higher-level responsibilities. Most companies make the situation worse by then promoting their best technical talent into management roles further reducing the overall capability of the organization (and frustrating good technical talent!). Hiring for potential is not as tough as it sounds. Research has shown that the best predictor of potential is learning agility - the capability of a person to effectively handle new and challenging situations. Learning agile people not only handle first-time challenges well, they actually relish the opportunity, inspire others to step up, and apply what they learned from the challenge in other situations. As with Google's experience mentioned previously, they are not afraid to fail and learn from failure. Want to learn more about changing your hiring paradigm? Click here for more suggestions. | 
