“There are five hiring attributes we have across the company,” explained Bock. “If it’s a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they’re predictive.”
Lo cuenta Thomas Friedman en The New York Times. Los cinco atributos resumidos, en orden de importancia:
- Habilidades cognitivas generales (habilidad para aprender).
- Liderazgo emergente (habilidad para asumir y abandonar el rol de líder, según requiera la situación).
- Humildad (reconocer las aportaciones de otros).
- Responsabilidad («ownership»).
- Conocimientos y habilidades en el ámbito para el que se contrata el candidato.
Llama la atención que, si el trabajo no es de programar, los conocimientos y habilidades en el ámbito para el que se contrata tienen la menor importancia de los cinco atributos.
The least important attribute they look for is “expertise.” Said Bock: “If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who’s been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: ‘I’ve seen this 100 times before; here’s what you do.’ ” Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, “because most of the time it’s not that hard.” Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they’ll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.