REPORT:

GOOGLE’S HUMAN

RESOURCE

MANAGEMENT

Student Name: Sarah Frost

Student Number: 00085475T

Teacher’s Name: Sanet Van Wyk

Due Date: Sunday 6th January 2013

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction………………………………………………………………….pg 2

Google Inc. ………………………………………………………………….pg 2

Organisational Goal and Vision…………………………………………...pg 2

Cultural Environment……………………………………………………….pg 3

Human Resources Management………………………………………….pg 3

Google’s Selection and Recruiting………………………………………..pg 4

Social Good………………………………………………………………….pg 5

Microsoft……………………………………………………………………..pg 5

Recommendations………………………………………………………….pg 5

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..pg 6

References…………………………………………………………………..pg 7

Appendix

“Ten Things We Know To Be True”………………………………………pg 9

Sarah Frost 00085475T 6/01/2013 Page 2

Introduction

“Human resource management (HRM) includes all those activities associated with

attracting, developing and maintaining an effective workforce, and also terminating

the employment relationship. Successful Human Resource Management requires

good knowledge of the skills and attributes that are required by an organisation in

pursuit of its goals” (Study Guide, Pg. 54)

This report is based on Google’s Human Resource structure. Covered in the report

firstly will be a background on Google and the Organisational goal and vision. The

report will then show Google’s cultural environment along with the structure of

Google’s Human Resource Management. The selection process for Google’s

recruitment will be explained along with Google’s ‘Don’t be Evil’ motto. The report will

also look into how Google’s main competitor, Microsoft, handles their recruitment

process.

Google Inc.

Google Inc. was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin; two students

whom met when they attended Stanford University together. The idea for Google’s

search engine came to Larry Page in a dream about downloading the entire web and

keeping all of the links (Elmer, 2011), Larry Page quotes “When no one else is crazy

enough to do it, you have little competition”.

Organisational Goal and Vision

The work culture and employee empowerment philosophy at Google is that the

founders; Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wanted to establish Google as a company

that was to be seen as “run by geeks”. (Vogelstein & Lashinsky, 2004) The HR

Department was to attract the smartest minds across the globe to work for Google,

this is followed with a strict hiring process which includes discovering the candidates

back ground as to which university they had graduated from Google’s mission

statement is “To organise the world information and make it universally accessible

and useful” (Google.com)

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Cultural Environment

“It’s really the people that make Google the kind of company it is. We hire people

who are smart and determined, and we favour ability over experience. Although

Googlers’ share common goals and visions for the company, we hail from all walks

of life and speak dozens of languages, reflecting the global audience that we serve.”

(Google.com)

Google has made its work environment colourful and projects the image of being a

fun place to work; with free meals, gyms, spas, doctors on site, hybrid vehicles for

use, bringing your pet to work, swimming pools, sleep pods and wearing your

pyjamas to work. (Salah, 2010)

Employees of Google are also required to spend 80% of their time on the core

search and advertising business, and 20% of their time on technical projects of their

own choosing. Google’s Human Resources Director, Liane Hornsey, states;

"Employees' work structure follows a '70/20/10' model, an arrangement which,

Hornsey says, is 'hugely important to anyone who works here'. This refers to a

breakdown of the working week: 70 per cent of the employee's time should be spent

on the business, fulfilling the job role (which, incidentally, is very clearly defined -

providing absolute clarity about the job description is essential as 'good people only

fail if they do not know their role'). Ten per cent of the schedule is time to do

'whatever [the employee] wants' – time for innovation and creativity, freedom to

think. Twenty per cent of the time – or one day out of every week - she calls

'personal work', a period spent on personal development which will ultimately benefit

the company. '[Staff] can work on whatever they want to work on, as long as it's in

line with the mission [of Google]. This gives you time to develop'." (Fletcher, 2007)

Human Resource Management

Human Resource Management (HRM) is the function within an organization that

focuses on recruitment of, management of, and providing direction for the people

who work in the organization. HRM can also be performed by line managers.

(Heathfield, 2012)

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Human Resource practices at Google are called “People Operations”, this is

designed to underline the fact that the department is for the people and ensures a

strong employee-employer relationship. Google’s Human Resource practices reveal

the impressive results of the company’s approach, which helps with increasing

employee productivity. (Puliyenthuruthel, 2005)

Google’s Selection and Recruiting

Dodge (2010) states; “The Google hiring process is designed to hire the most

talented, creative, and articulate people in the world who will be the best fit for

Google”.

The recruitment process is a long and gruelling process which has been stated by

Don Dodge (Dodge, 2010) as selective as applying to Harvard or Yale Universities.

The first step is the Recruitment Screen; this is a process where recruiters screen all

of the applicants experience and education to see if there are any roles available that

are relevant to the applicant. The phone screen follows and is usually conducted by

a staff member in the same department that the applicant will be applying, this

process usually takes around 30 minutes. The on-site interview is conducted with 4

or 5 different members of staff from different levels of hierarchy; these interviews last

45 minutes each. Questions asked in these interviews range from “How many golf

balls fit into a bus” to “There are 8 balls. 7 weigh the same, 1 is heavier. Using a

balancing scale, how do you find the heavier ball with just 2 weighs?” These

questions are asked to observe thought processes and to test quick thinking ability.

Interview feedback is reviewed by recruiters and if the applicant is successful they

will be passed onto the hiring committee; the hiring committee consists of senior

managers and directors, the hiring committee reviews all of the feedback submitted

and if the consensus is to hire the applicant then the next level for review is the

executive review. The executive review is senior level management; if the applicant

is successful they are then passed on to the compensation committee. The

compensation committee are to determine the rate of compensation which is fair

according to the applicants experience, education and job role. The final executive

review is then to approve the compensation committee’s decision and the recruiter

will then notify the applicant of Google’s offer to start as an employee, or ‘Googler’.

(Dodge, 2010)

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Social Good

Google has a corporate motto “Don’t be Evil”, this motto is to remind employees that

commitment to be ethical is part and parcel of being a leader at Google. 99% of staff

indicates that “Management is honest and ethical in its business practices”. The

standards of conduct that Google employees adhere to concern internal business

practices (respecting each other, protecting confidentiality, protecting Google’s

assets), external relations with customers and partners, and the impact of Google’s

work on the larger society. (Google.com)

Microsoft

Like Google, Microsoft only hire smart and innovative workers, their recruitment

process is similar to Google’s although it is not as long and drawn out as Google’s;

“People are what make Microsoft the unique, innovative and the progressive

company that it is. To ensure we invest in this critical asset, Human Resources

employees identify, hire, and grow our people and develop and run our industry-

leading compensation and benefits programs.” (Microsoft.com)

Recommendations

Much of Google’s success has been based on the fact that they are more forward

thinking than other companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft (Elgin, 2005) Google

has built a culture where “well chosen” elite performers are hired to fulfil the

company’s vacancies; as Google grows in size and gains more business the biggest

challenge for Google is to keep the ideals of a small business so that the staff do not

feel like “just another number”

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Conclusion

As the report states; Google has a great Human Resources structure that keeps their

staff happy and wanting to come to work. Google will have to keep this culture

happening to continue to attract and keep the current level of talent that they are

currently hiring. The ‘70/20/10’ work structure should be kept in place for Google to

keep current staff members free thinking, which will enable the product’s that Google

offers to stay fresh and above their competitors.

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References

Dodge, D. 2010, ‘How to get a job at Google, interview questions, hiring

process’, 14th September 2010, viewed 28th December 2012,

<http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/09/how-to-get-a-job-

at-google-interview-questions-hiring-process.html

Elgin, B., 2005, ‘Managing Google’s Idea Factory’, 2nd October 2005, viewed

28th December 2012, < http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-10-

02/managing-googles-idea-factory

Elmer, P., 2011 ‘What would Larry Page do? Leadership lessons from

Google’s doyen’, 18th April 2011, viewed 28th December 2012

<http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/04/18/what-would-larry-page-do-

leadership-lessons-from-googles-doyen/

Fletcher, S., 2007, ‘Google: Recruiting and Developing Top Talent’, 1st

February 2007, viewed 28th December 2012

<http://www.hrzone.co.uk/item/164452

<https://www.google.com.au/intl/en/about/company/philosophy/ , viewed 28th

December 2012

Heathfield, S.M, 2012, ‘What is Human Resource Management?’ viewed 28th

December 2012,

http://humanresources.about.com/od/glossaryh/f/hr_management.htm

Hornsey, L 2012,’Best Practice HR Tips’, Meet The Boss, 23rd November,

viewed 28th December 2012,

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRsJbpppvEU

<http://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/au/applyoverview.aspx, viewed 28th

December 2012

Puliyenthuruthel, J. 2005 ‘How Google Searches—For Talent’, 10th April 2005,

viewed 28th December 2012 <http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-04-

10/how-google-searches-for-talent

Salah, G 2010, ‘Google Office Around the World’, 11th March 2010, viewed

28th December 2012,

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB5utwRnfH4&NR=1&feature=endscreen

Sarah Frost 00085475T 6/01/2013 Page 8

Vogelstein, F. & Lashinsky, A. May 2004. “At Google, Beware the IPO

Aftermath” Fortune 17th, Vol. 149 Issue 10, p32-34.

William Blue College, 2012, Study Guide, Pg. 54

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Appendix

Ten things we know to be true

We first wrote these “10 things” when Google was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit

this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does—and you can hold us to that.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether

we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take

great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or

bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement

in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it

offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications,

we believe they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been

designed differently.

2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.

We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving

search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued

iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous

improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless

experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what

we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of

search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the

ever-expanding information in their lives.

3. Fast is better than slow.

We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right

away–and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is

to have people leave our website as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes

from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own

speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a

fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a

mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern

web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

4. Democracy on the web works.

Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to

help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every

web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented

PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources

of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually

improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In

Sarah Frost 00085475T 6/01/2013 Page 10

the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes

place through the collective effort of many programmers.

5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.

The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are,

whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for

mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone,

from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several

different ways to access Google search on a phone. In addition, we’re hoping to fuel greater

innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, a free, open source mobile platform.

Android brings the openness that shaped the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does

Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences,

but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.

6. You can make money without doing evil.

Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to

companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the

web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products;

hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads

relevant to their site content. To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they

are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and

practices:

o We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where

they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and

only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find–so it’s possible that certain searches

won’t lead to any ads at all.

o We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop–

up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested.

We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much

higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or

large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.

o Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it does not

compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our

partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users

trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

7. There’s always more information out there.

Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our

engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it

was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number

and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like

adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and

Sarah Frost 00085475T 6/01/2013 Page 11

millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s

information to people seeking answers.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.

Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for

the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more than 60

countries, maintain more than 180 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to

people living outside the United States. We offer Google’s search interface in more than 130

languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language,

and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages

and accessible formats as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content

written on the other side of the world in languages they don’t speak. With these tools and the

help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality

of services we can offer in even the most far–flung corners of the globe.

9. You can be serious without a suit.

Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge

should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right

company culture–and that doesn’t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an

emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our

overall success. We put great stock in our employees–energetic, passionate people from

diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be

casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are

traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed–and they may be the launch pad for a

new project destined for worldwide use.

10. Great just isn’t good enough.

We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals

we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get

further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work

well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers

saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled

typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.

Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is our

problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and

meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had

more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems

obvious–but that’s because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the kinds

of changes we seek to make, and we’re always looking for new places where we can make a

difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving

force behind everything we do.

Privacy

Our Privacy Policy, tools and more about managing your information on Google.

Sarah Frost 00085475T 6/01/2013 Page 12

More

Security

Our approach to security, and how to report a security issue.

More

Software principles

Our stand against deceptive Internet software.

More