Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy
19th May 2010
Google has their own way of doing things.
We rely on the Lake Wobegon Strategy, which says only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees.
Another hiring strategy we use is no hiring manager. Whenever you give project managers responsibility for hiring for their own projects they’ll take the best candidate in the pool, even if that candidate is sub-standard for the company, because every manager wants some help for their project rather than no help. That’s why we do all hiring at the company level, not the project level. First we decide which candidates are above the hiring threshold, and then we decide what projects they can best contribute to.