I asked my students if they would like to work for Google, almost all said "Yes!" - my response? "Make it happen!"

Google offices in Milan.
Image source: Zeospot.

Yesterday in class we were discussing interaction type jobs in which "talking, e-mailing, presenting, or persuading other people is the primary value-adding activity" (Laudon and Laudon, 2013). We discussed how Ireland has become a centre in Europe for this type of work, with many high tech companies like Google, eBay, PayPal, Linkedin, and Facebook setting up offices in Dublin. Most students said they would like to work for Google and I rather pompously said in response to "Make it happen". Coincidentally, I read an interview in the New York Times: "How to Get a Job at Google" in which Laszlo Bock (Senior VP of People Operations for Google) said first "Good grades certainly don't hurt", and then listed five hiring attributes they have across the company.

The first attribute is the most important one for me:

1. 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".
   
   The others are:
   
2. Leadership
3. Humility and ownership
4. Argue like hell
5. Learn from mistakes

Read the full article which makes for very interesting reading. The article ends with a shot at Colleges: "Too many colleges, he added, “don't deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don't learn the most useful things for your life. It’s [just] an extended adolescence.”

Ouch!