El expediente académico ¿sirve para algo?

Según Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations de Google, el expediente académico o las notas en pruebas de selección no sirven para predecir el desempeño profesional. En cambio las entrevistas de incidentes críticos sí funcionan. También enfatiza la importancia de evaluar y dar feedback periodicamente a los managers para mejorar su calidad y el ambiente de trabajo.

Algunos extractos:

  • Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. 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.
  • Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.
  • Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, bu
    t you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. 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.
  • Part of the challenge with leadership is that it’s very driven by gut instinct in most cases — and even worse, everyone thinks they’re really good at it. The reality is that very few people are.
  • We found that, for leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.
  • We’ve actually made it harder to be a bad manager. If you go back to somebody and say, “Look, you’re an eighth-percentile people manager at Google. This is what people say.” They might say, “Well, you know, I’m actually better than that.” And then I’ll say, “That’s how you feel. But these are the facts that people are reporting about how they experience you.”

Puedes ver un extracto bastante simplista en El Confidencial, o más recomendable, leer la entrevista original en The New York Times.

Esta entrada fue publicada en Entrevistas, Medición y diagnóstico, Organización del talento. Guarda el enlace permanente.