Google: Pompous Interview Brainteasers Are Pointless

If you've ever been in consideration for a job at Google, you might have been asked a really, really annoying interview question.

Something like: How many times a day do a clock's hands overlap? Or, how many resumes does Google receive each year for software engineering? Basically, something that nobody would know off the top of their head, or that doesn't even pertain to the job. 

It's been said that these so-called brainteasers help the interviewer see how you can work through a problem. But in reality, they're completely pointless, a Google HR exec has admitted.

"On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time," Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, told The New York Times. "How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don't predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart."

So if Google is no longer asking knockouts like "how many vacuums are made every year in the USA?" then what type of questions is it asking? According to Bock, the Web giant is relying on more behavior-based queries, like "Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem."

"When you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information," he explained. "One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable 'meta' information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult."

Meanwhile, Google also no longer asks all potential employees for a transcript, GPAs, and test scores — unless you're just a few years out of school. The Web giant found that this information — like brainteasers  — doesn't serve as a predictor of who will prove to be a good employee.

"One of the things we've seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there's a slight correlation," Bock said.