Why Is It So Hard to Hire Great People?

This week, Google admitted that its infamous brainteasers -- e.g.: "How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?" -- are awful at predicting who will be a good employee.

Your reaction might be: um, FINALLY. And, sure, thinking about windows-per-housing-unit isn't the most direct way to assess engineering skill or creativity. But Google's flawed strategy was the answer to another brainteaser: What's the best way to hire great employees, anyway? People are complicated, organizations are complicated, matching people and organizations is complicated, and it's extremely difficult to predict who will be brilliant and who will be a bust.

"Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring," Laszlo Bock, Google's senior vice president for people operations, told LinkedIn. "We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It's a complete random mess."

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