About 7 years ago, Google founded its People Analytics team, which collects and uses data to bolster the company’s own management practices. (You can thank this group for the death of Google’s infamous brain-teaser interview questions.)
The group had a simple founding mission, according to Google’s executive Prasad Setty, who gave a talk at Google’s re:Work conference in October, at the company’s Mountain View headquarters.
“All people decisions at Google should be be based on data and analytics,” he said. “Initially we aspired for living up to a really strong form of this mission statement, we wanted analytics to spit out people decisions.”
Google was founded by, and is still dominated, by engineers. So as it started to hire thousands of people and needed to think more deeply about management over the last few years, it took an intensely data-centric approach. But not everything can be distilled down to an algorithm: even for Google’s engineers, automation has its limits.
For instance, in the early days of the People Analytics team, the group built an equation to help streamline the process Google uses to decide to which of its software engineers should get promoted. This is a pretty involved process. Decisions are made by committees of senior Google engineers. They meet off-site—the Santa Clara Hilton is a favorite spot, according to Setty—and review hundreds of nominations for promotion.
The People Analytics team thought a group of efficiency-minded software engineers would prefer an equation do some of the work. Here’s what Setty’s team came up with.
It’s not pretty, but apparently, it worked.
“We found it was reliable, it back-tested very well, it was stable across multiple cycles, and for almost a third of our promotion decisions, with 90% accuracy, we could just use this model to make the right decision,” Setty said.
The People Analytics team was thrilled. They thought they were about to save Google’s hiring committees a third of their work, letting the engineers focus on the toughest decisions.
The engineers hated it. And it never was used to make promotion decisions at Google.
“They didn’t want to hide behind a black box, they wanted to own the decisions they made, and they didn’t want to use a model,” said Setty, who headed up human resource analytics at financial services firm Capital One before joining Google.
Setty’s takeaway is that people need to make people decisions. The People Analytics group exists to arm decision makers with better information, not to replace them with algorithms.
That insight has helped drive Google’s approach to human resources and management.
The People Analytics group is in many ways fundamentally reshaping the way Google hires. For example, the company now de-emphasizes GPAs and university pedigree in favor of squishier attributes, such as “intellectual humility” and “learning ability.”
Here’s the full video of Setty’s presentation:
Photo via Anthony Quintano
The Quartz Chart of the Year™ will look something like this
At Quartz, we—and our readers—love charts.
We’re always on the hunt for a terrific fever line or bar graph that delivers deep insight at a single glance. We delve into data to churn out plenty of our own charts; heck, we’ve even built a cool tool that allows you to make them too.
Now we’re taking our obsession with charts to its logical conclusion: we’re launching a quest to find the best chart of the year. If you’re as chart-crazy as we are, we’re inviting you to help us select… [pause for imaginary drumroll]… the Quartz Chart of the Year™.
Send us the charts that made you go, “Whoa.” Tweet them (@matthewphillips) or email them (matt@qz.com) to us with the subject line “Chart of the year.”
We’re open to any type of chart: Ugly ones. Famous ones. Newsy ones. Idiosyncratic ones. They can be about anything, not just business and economics—so long as they have been published in calendar 2014.
Over the next few weeks we’ll parse your submissions and our own favorites, and roll out some posts spotlighting the potential contenders for crown.
We’ll announce the winner on Dec. 15.
Naturally, we’re recusing our own charts from the competition. But if you’ll forgive a little chest-thumping, we’re going to use some memorable Quartz charts to illustrate the attributes that we think make great charts—you might want to keep these in mind when nominating your favorites for … [egregious imaginary drumroll]…the Quartz Chart of the Year™.
1. Great charts are simple…
1. Great charts are simple…
2. They don’t waste your time…
…In other words, they’ve got news.
3. They give you a lot of information…
…so you can form a well-informed opinion.
4. They make a clear point…
5. They tell you something you didn’t know…
…Usually via some sort of underutilized data set.
6. Or they put something you knew into perspective…
…like the size of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.
7. They show something important about the world…
…like the unraveling of the world’s most-important housing market.
8. Or they influence an important debate…
…so much so that they become a story in their own right.
Get the Quartz Daily Brief in your inbox:
Why your Uber driver hates Uber
Uber has a public relations disaster on its hands this week. There’s nothing like threatening to dig up dirt on journalists to piss off, well, journalists.
But there’s another disgruntled group related to Uber: the drivers themselves. Quartz spent some time on Nov. 19 riding around with one to better understand life inside the global ride-hailing service. We’re withholding his last name because he fears he would lose his job for criticizing the company. We emailed Uber for comment and will update this piece if we get any.
Tony is 49 years old. He is an UberSUV driver in New York City. Raised in Brooklyn, Tony has been working as a driver since 1986—first at a private-luxury car company and now at Uber. Edited excerpts of what he told Quartz:
In 2012, I lost my car to Hurricane Sandy, and I had to rent out a car to drive around. Then somebody told me that a company called Uber was giving $1,000 to start driving for them, and then a certain percent for each ride. It was 25% for a sedan, and 28% for an SUV. So I went and started working for Uber.
Basically, there’s no hiring process or anything like that. You just go there, and they give you a class in which they tell you something about Uber, and basic stuff about what to do with the customer, how long to wait, and everything I at least knew as a driver because I went there with experience.
There is no training. They basically hire people from the gutter. They don’t care. They just need bodies. They need somebody who can get their own cars, fit the best possible GPS, and start driving.
Uber doesn’t have physical contracts. Everything is electronically done. But if you don’t sign on their terms and conditions, you cannot work. So we have to sign, though it’s actually not signing. They send a link, and you have to electronically enter and accept the terms. And these terms, even Uber guys who wrote them wouldn’t understand. That’s how long and com
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