What Bosses Really Think About Returning to the Office On Thursday, June 18, Google announced its new initiative called “Project Aristotle,” which calls on managers to rethink the way they lead employees.
But why was the company’s CEO Larry Page so adamant about letting go of his former manager, Eric Schmidt?
The answer to that question is what many people are calling “The Google Sucker Punch,” a term coined by the company’s former executive recruiter, Michael Stolar, that represents a new paradigm in the workplace.
That’s because Google’s CEO wants to turn the company into an organization that’s so good at solving hard technical problems that the company’s culture becomes one where people don’t have to worry about keeping their jobs.
What happens, however, if Google’s executive recruiters start bringing their philosophy to the workplace?
The Answer Is In the Sucker Punch
The way Google recruits talent in the workplace is a great analogy.
I interviewed Michael Stolar who was the top executive recruiter for almost every major Silicon Valley tech company from Netscape to Netscape Navigator.
What he told me is that recruiters are often very good at identifying the best talent for their company in an interview that usually involves a series of five to seven questions.
But, like a lot of companies, in Google’s case, those questions actually end up being very technical questions that involve a lot of math and science. So, what are the best candidates?
They’re typically at least a masters in something like computer science or math. A lot of us are in software, of course, so they tend to be good in the programming language that they were already using. So, that’s probably what they’re more familiar with.
In Google’s case, it’s actually been pretty hard to recruit good front-end developers because they’re probably better at solving problem-solving type of programming, but at the same time, they’re more comfortable in the programming languages that Google’s programming language has.
So, it’s been hard to find people whose skills matched what Google is looking for right now.
That’s the first challenge.
However, the second challenge for recruiters is that at Google, the company’s culture is much more comfortable in solving complex problems.
At the same time, they’re really good at the technical stuff, which is exactly what recruiters were asking for in an interview
