Google vs. Yahoo’s HR strategy

1

Table of Contents

Introduction.............................................................................................................................. 2

Mission and Vision Statements........................................................................................... 2

Benefits Provided.................................................................................................................... 2

Revenue...................................................................................................................................... 5

Standing in top search engine............................................................................................. 5

Rankings: Forbes 100 Best Employers in the United States......................................6

Google & Yahoo Future Projects......................................................................................... 6

Employee Growth.................................................................................................................... 7

Marketing and Recruiting Strategies................................................................................7

Conclusion:.....................................................................................................................................................9

1

Introduction

We will be comparing the two largest online search engines, Google and Yahoo!. This will give the readers of the Vancouver Sun, accurate and useful information in regards to Google’s and Yahoo’s HR strategies so that the readers may be able to apply similar practices to help their HR departments. We will be examining many aspects of their business including: vision, mission, values, revenue, employee growth, competitive standings, benefits, recruitment & recruitment strategies and future projects. We will be comparing the two companies in these aspects in regard to HR strategy.

Mission and Vision StatementsGoogle:To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Yahoo!:To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge.

Summary:

Even though the wording used by Google and Yahoo! is slightly different, the underlying statements from both companies express the same idea. Each company is basically stating that their objective is to provide the internet community with the most organized and relevant information.

Benefits ProvidedBenefit Google Yahoo!

Medical 3 Carriers·         Blue Shield (PPO or HMO)·         CIGNA(PPO)·         Kaiser (HMO)

3 Carriers·         EPO·         PPO·         HRA

Dental Comprehensive coverage through Delta Dental 100% coverage for preventive care and 90% for basic services, also apply for family members of employee.

Vision Exams, contacts, lenses and frames all generously covered.

Free annual eye exam and glasses.

Health Automatic coverage at 2 times annual salaryOption to purchase additional life insurance

Flexible Spending Account

Ergonomics available available

Day care available Free day-care service for all includes after-school care with pre-tax dollars.

Adoption assistance

$5000 from Google for each kid adopted : $5000 from Yahoo for each kid you adopted.

Vacation ·         1st year: 15 days·         4th year: 20 days·         6th year: 25 days

15 days in year two and an additional day for each year of employment after that.

Holidays 12 paid holidays (sick days taken as necessary) Up to 10 paid holidays and two personal floating holidays a year.

Fitness Gym, and swimming pool Free gym and yoga, boot camp, martial arts, golf and $100 fitness card.

Employee Assistance Program

Services for employees and their dependents include free short-term counseling, legal consultations, financial counseling, child care referrals, pet care referrals, and more.

No

Disability Short Term Disability Insurance coverage provided at approximately 100% of take-home pay. Long Term Disability coverage provided at 60% of salary once Short Term Disability is exhausted.

Yes

Business Travel Accident Insurance

Automatic coverage at 2 times annual salary. No

College Savings Plan

This plan provides employees with a way to save money for post-secondary education.

$5000 a year for tuition, books and other fees.

Investment Google 401(k) plan: Employees may contribute up to 60% and receive a Google match of up to the greatest of (a) 100% of your contribution up to $3,000 or (b) 50% of your contribution up to $8,250 per year with no vesting schedule! We offer a variety of investment options to choose from through Vanguard, our 401(k) Plan Administrator. To help you with those tough investment decisions, employees can access Financial Engines to receive personalized

Contribute up to 50% of your salary (up to the irs maximum) on a pre- tax basis, and receive a 25% match from Yahoo!

investment advice

Maternity Benefits

Up to 12 weeks off at approximately 100% pay, eligible for an additional 6 weeks if employed at Google for more than 1 year.

No

Parental Leave Up to 7 weeks off at approximately 100% take-home pay

No

Take-Out Benefit To help make things easier, new moms and dads are able to expense up to $500 for take-out meals during the first 3 months that they are home with their new baby.

No

Food Free gourmet lunch and dinner Yes

On-site doctor Doctor, Physical therapy, and Chiropractor No

Shuttle services

Free services to  San Francisco, East Bay, and South Bay locations

No

Financial planning classes

Free educational classes No

On-site services

On-site oil change and car wash services, dry cleaning, massage therapy, gym, hair stylist, fitness classes and bike repair.

No

Inclusive Communities

No Yahoo! Pride, Accessibility at Yahoo!, Yahoo! African-Americans, South Asians@Yahoo, Yahoo! Women in Tech, Yahoo! Chinese

Summary:

Google and Yahoo! both have very similar benefits ranging from medical, dental, eye care and many others that gives employees exciting incentives to work for their organization. Google and Yahoo! are both trying to create and sustain an image for their organizations that clearly states that they are concerned about the well being of their employees and will try to provided services that are needed.

Revenue

Google:

Google have reported positive earning revenues of $5.94 billion USD in the third quarter of 2009. This revenue figure is representing a 7% increase over third quarter of 2008. Much of Google’s business now lies outside the border of the United States of America.  Revenues outside the United States reached $3.14 billion USD in the third quarter of 2009. This figure represents 53% of the total revenues in the third quarter of 2009, earned by Google.  <http://investor.google.com/earnings/2009/Q3_google_earnings.html>

Yahoo!:

Yahoo! revenue , according to CNET News <http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10379330-265.html>, have fallen an alarming 12% from the previous year. In Third quarter 2009, Yahoo! had positive revenues of $1.575 Billion USD compared to revenue of $ 1.764 billion a year earlier. Yahoo!’s revenue is also far behind that of Google. Yahoo!’s revenue was slightly less the negative fivefold that of Google’s.

Summary:

Yahoo!’s revenue continues to decrease over each quarter, and Google seems to be able to sustain steady increases in net revenues.  Google is maintaining dominance in online search engines in terms of earnings; with it’s growing revenue of $6 billion.  

Standing in top search engineTime Period Google Market Share Yahoo! Market Share

June 6th, 2010 71.65 % 14.28 %

July 7th, 2010 71.43 % 14.43 %

August 28th, 2010 71.59 % 14.28 %

Summary:

Google has continued to maintain the largest market share in North Americas top search engines with 72% of Internet searches. Yahoo has shown a slow decline of their market share through out the years gradually giving up more and more shares to their dominating competitor.

Rankings: Forbes 100 Best Employers in the United States

Google: # 4 This ranking by Forbes is an example of Google’s attention to creating a fun, exciting, challenging and overall successful corporate atmosphere. Their ability to engage and empower their employees has lead to many of the top university graduates to seek employment at Google.

Yahoo!: Not in the rankings

This ranking by Forbes demonstrates Yahoo!s inability to attract the attention of new employees. They have not adapted well to the new Internet culture and seem to be stuck in the 1990’s in terms of their recruitment ability. If Yahoo! cannot attract the newest and brightest talents from across the world, they will be doomed to stay off the Forbes rankings forever.

Summary:

Although Google and Yahoo! both have very similar benefits, Forbes has ranked Google as #4 whereas Yahoo! is not listed in the rankings. This shows how Yahoo has lost its competitive edge in the online search engine industry to Google, and how Google has grown over the past couple years and gained recognition as the most important search engine. As well Google’s creative ways in attracting new talent has lead them to have such a high ranking in terms of companies to work for.

Google & Yahoo Future Projects

Google :

1) Google Buzz: Released in February 9 2010 and is a social networking and messaging tool where users will be able to share links photos, videos, as well as hosts many other features that will be able to compete with Facebook, Twitter, and other micro blogging services.

2) Google energy: Invested $38.8 million into renewable energy project in two wind farms in North Dakota. Will be able to generate 169.5MW of power, which is enough to supply power to 55,000 homes.

3) Google Wave: Was expected to be Google’s next big thing but was scrapped in 2010

Yahoo!:

1) Yahoo! is working closely together with the two biggest social networks,

Twitter and Facebook, to implement it into their existing web pages, such as Yahoo! mail, and Yahoo!.com, and Yahoo! Sports. By doing so Yahoo! and Facebook are rumored to be attempting a “gmail killer” by making Project Titan Facebook's "full-fledged webmail client," which will virtully eliminate Google’s gmail if Facebook’s customers follow.

Summary:

The future of Google and Yahoo! is in social media strategies. Google is now branching off into their own social networking system (Google Buzz) in order to compete with the already existing Facebook, Twitter, and other micro blogging websites. Yahoo! however is taking a different approach and has worked closely with Facebook, and Twitter in order to implement their services into their websites and gain their customer base.

Employee GrowthGoogle:

Google hired 2,130 people in their third quarter and now employs almost 16,000 worldwide. It’s very unusual that an amazing 41 % of the company has been hired in the last 12 months.

Yahoo!:

Yahoo! hired 1,200 people in their third quarter for a total of 13,600 employees.If we want we can go into detail about their turnover, because the majority of their CEO's and such have all quit within the resent years?

Summary:

Both Yahoo! and Google seem to have no problem finding people to hire. One does have to question Google’s hiring strategy in regards to quantity and possibly turn over rate? It would have to be very hard for Google to train and manage such a large amount of new employees.

Marketing and Recruiting Strategies

Google:

During the recruitment process Google is specifically looking for future candidates who are entrepreneur “go-getters”. It is vital that candidates come from a very strong educational background. It has been reported in the past, that Google has primarily hired employees who have graduated from Ivy League Universities or individuals with a 4.0 GPA.

“As Peter Norvig, Director of Google Research, explains: But how do you maintain the skill level while roughly doubling in size each year? We rely on the Lake Wobegon Strategy, which says only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees. An alternative strategy (popular in the dot-com boom period) is to justify a hire by saying “this candidate is clearly better than at least one of our current employees.”

Google engages in employer branding through their corporate website; they provide resume prep techniques, and what to expect in an interview. Google’s recruiting process usually consists of a one or two phone screening interview, an on-site interview, and an aptitude test, the ‘Google Labs Apptitude Test (GLAT).’They also give candidates situational and behavioral questions to test the candidate’s creativity level. Though their recruiting process seems somewhat normal, it has been known to span over weeks and months due to their HR departments’ selective selection process.

They try to involve as many departments as possible in their hiring process. By doing so, they feel that it allows the candidate to have a good understanding about the organizations values and culture. This also allows the candidates to have an idea of what kind of people they are working with.

“In late 2005, Dr. John Sullivan, a human resources expert, reported that 350 peopleat Google were dedicated to recruitment. With 5,000 employees at the time, this meant that 1 in 14 Google employees was working in recruitment. That’s an extremely high ratio, considering that in traditional companies the ratio is 1 recruitment employee per 100employees.”

This effective selection process is vital for the organization as it has important strategic significance for the success of this fast-growing company.

Yahoo!:

During the recruitment process Yahoo! is specifically looking for future candidates who are innovative tech savvy graduates from the best technical institutes of the World.

Yahoo engages in employer branding by setting a clear impression of their organization. They achieve this by defining the company culture, career paths and business prospects through their corporate website. They enhance involvement by providing personal employee profiles; these third-party sources of information are titled, ‘My Life at Yahoo. Yahoo’s selection process is divided in to two sections, technological experts, the non technological. Yahoo also provides a source of information for student internships. The technological expert’s recruitment process consists of a written test, personal interview, programming test, and a HR interview. For the non-technological, they have to complete a written test (MCQ), a technical interview and finally a HR interview. Unlike Google, Yahoo’s recruiting process has been

known to be very straight forward and is usually completed in a timely manner. At Yahoo, when an applicant applies on-line for a position, they are promptly notified by an automatic-email response confirming that their interest has been notified.

Both:

Both Yahoo! and Google are known to use online recruiting channels through their corporate websites to communicate they’re branding with their target audience as their main recruiting strategy. Online recruiting is highly beneficial for companies. Both Google and Yahoo! provide information about resume preparation and interviewing, although Google provides this directly through their site, and Yahoo! provides a direct link to Monster.ca where the information can be accessed. Google is more effective because they communicate their criteria for potential employees, opposed to a general guideline. Both organizations have job search tools that allow for applicants to search job openings by location and category.This is very beneficial because these days many people access the Internet to fill out online applications or post resumes. This growing trend of job-hunting allows recruiting specialists the advantage of screening a large pool of candidates, many of which are extremely talented and qualified.It appears that both Google and Yahoo! use a multiple-hurdle strategy, they incorporate a series of successive steps in their selection process. Once an applicant becomes a candidate, both organizations have a Human Resource specialist contact the applicant by phone to discuss the position in detail and to schedule an on-site interview.

Summary:

Both Yahoo! and Google use online recruiting, and similar interview processes. They also seem to be looking for somewhat similar recruitments; highly educated individuals. Those Google seems to be the better company, in regards to their standing and revenue, Yahoo! has seem to have won the recruiting process because of their organized HR team.

Conclusion:

Google is overall the more successful company because their employees have to be consistently keeping up with the company’s innovative needs, if they want to continue to be an employee with Google. If Google believes that its employee are not keeping up with their standards then they have made it clear that they have no problem replacing an employee with the newest top graduate from an Ivy League school. Google’s strategies, which consist of great employee benefits and high innovative and creative atmosphere, is obviously working for them because they continue to dominate the online search engine market. Though when it comes to their other project fields, such as Google Wave, they don’t

seem to have the same results. They have failed at some of their side projects, but every great entrepreneur needs to fail to succeed.Yahoo! has a great recruiting strategy and treats their employees with great respect, but that just does not seem to be enough in the online industry they are struggling to compete in. They have continued to lose revenue and market share and if they do not create a competitive advantage soon then Google may force them out of business. With that said Google, and Yahoo! are two competitive companies who continue to lead with their innovation and creative ideas. However Google has taken the next step and has been one of the most successful companies in the new millennium.