Google Lets, Google looks

The strength of the Google brand is not skin deep; it starts in the heads and hearts of the firm’s employees-called “Googlers.” The firm attracts the best-it gets 1,500 resumes a day from Googler wannabes-but can hire only a few, spending 87 person hours per successful candidate to screen down to the 300 or so Googlers it hired in 2002. Google looks for two types of new Googlers. One type is the brilliant, but sometimes a little weird, risk taker. The second type is the certified PhD nerd. When hiring the first category, Google’s chief engineer, Wayne Rosing, says, “We look for smart.

Smart as in, do they do something weird outside of work, something off the beaten path? That translates into people who have no fear of trying difficult projects and going outside the bounds of what they know.” Google also scours the top computer science programs and research labs in the world to hire PhDs who reportedly give the company 90 percent of the best search engine people in the world. These are the people who can shoot holes in the wild ideas of the weird people. Mix it all up, let people do their own thing in an environment where managers have as many as 160 direct reports, and you get a culture in which people manage themselves. They take lots of risks and create plenty of failures along the way, but all in a culture dedicated to the relentless drive to deliver on the brand promise of faster and better. Google does it better than perhaps any other computer firm in the world, something nerds understood about the brand from the beginning.

Its systems may be open, but its financial books are not. Private, secretive, but apparently highly profitable, the company is estimated by some analysts to be reaping several hundred million dollars a year, accounting for three quarters of all web searches. When Fast Company featured Google in its April 2003 issue, it concluded, “The cardinal rule at Google is, if you can do something that will improve the user’s experience, do it. Because it’s not perfect, being dominant isn’t good enough. And the maniacal attack on imperfection reflects a genuine belief in the primacy of the customer.” Similar to the sense you get in talking to Weymooth and Frantz about the Talking Heads, there’s something about the Google brand that makes it feel pure-less of a commercial sellout than many Internet inhabitants, even though it now partners with Internet giants such as AOL. Without the ballyhoo of an IPO or expensive advertising, Google lets its customers do the evangelizing for it. First, win the nerds; then let them win the rest of the world. It worked for the Talking Heads, and it’s working for Google.