The search giant, GOOGLE, doesn’t go for hiring applicants with big nor excellent college degrees.
Google’s chairman and head of hiring, Laszlo Bock, has given a few insights in the New York Times on how he sorts through a multitude of bright applicants.
The upshot is that Google values the skills and experiences that candidates get in college, but a degree doesn’t tell them much about talent or grit. Here are the 5 Reasons Why Google Despises Hiring Top College Graduates
1. You don’t need a college degree to be talented
When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people,” Bock said.
Many businesses “require” a college degree; at Google, the word “college”, isn’t even its an official guide to hiring. With the rise of self-paced college courses and vocational learning, plenty of driven people can teach themselves all of the necessary skills to work at the company.
2. You should demonstrate a SKILL, not anexpertise
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 HR 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,’” Bock said.
A degree really doesn’t say what a graduate can do.
Can they build a website? Can they think interestingly about problems, or did they just pass some tests?
3. Logic is learned, and stats are super important
Humans are by nature creative beings, but not by nature logical, structured-thinking beings. Those are skills you have to learn,” Bock said.
Logical thinking goes way beyond programming. For instance, back in 2010, Facebook put up a blog post claiming that political candidates with more fans were more likely to win their race, implying that getting more Facebook fans would improve their chances. In no uncertain terms, this was a phenomenally bad argument.
The Facebook employees who ran the statistics understood some basic logic, but they didn’t demonstrate analytical thinking.
4. Prove grit
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt took a not-so-subtle swipe at tech critics who say that college is overrated. 
There are various people who run around and make claims that higher education is not a good use of your time: they’re just wrong,” he told the audience at the SXSW conference, where he was on stage promoting his book The New Digital Age
It looks like the thing that separates out the capable students from the really successful ones is not so much their knowledge but their persistence at something,” he added.
In other words, if a kid quits at the first sign of trouble, all the natural intelligence in the world won’t matter.
If all you care about is money, you should go to college. If all you care about is culture and creativity, you should go to college. If all you care about is having fun, you should go to college. Go to college. I can’t be any clearer.”
5. If you go to college, focus on SKILLS
My belief is not that one shouldn’t go to college … most don’t put enough thought into why they’re going and what they want to get out of it,” Block said.
Both Bock and Schmidt are adamant that most people should go to college but that skills and experience are more important than the stamp of expertise. Bock says Google is looking for the kinds of projects candidates completed or what they accomplished at an internship.
via venture beat
