Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • Brightmine
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Free trial
    • Request a quote
  • Webinars
  • Advertise
  • OHW+

Personnel Today

Register
Log in
Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • Brightmine
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Free trial
    • Request a quote
  • Webinars
  • Advertise
  • OHW+

Employee engagementPeople analyticsRecruitment & retentionEmployer brandingOnboarding

What it’s really like to work in HR at Google

by Jo Faragher 23 Apr 2014
by Jo Faragher 23 Apr 2014

If you’ve ever seen the film The Internship, you probably have a set idea of what it might be like to work for the world’s most famous search engine company; everything is in primary colours, all of the food and drink is free, and they even have slides in their offices.

But while art does imitate real life to a certain extent (the food really is free), Google has grown its workforce phenomenally to more than 40,000 since it started in 1998, and has had to evolve its HR practices to accommodate.

In fact, HR at Google (known as “People Operations”) incorporates many of the features we might expect from a more “traditional” corporation: business partners, central programmes around diversity and culture, and a very busy recruitment function.

At the recent Google Atmosphere event at the company’s London headquarters, an audience of HR professionals got a taste of what life at Google is like, and this is what they discovered:

The culture

“We’ve grown at a fast pace, but the culture and type of people we hire have stayed the same,” says Barbara Matthews, an HR business partner. There is a flat management hierarchy, and every Friday founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin hold a Q&A where “Googlers” can ask any question they like. “We want people to stand up and say if they think something is wrong,” says Matthews.


Barbara Matthews, HR business partner at Google, discusses how it responds to people-related data.

Role descriptions are not set in stone, and the aim is to “only create as much structure as is necessary”, with mobility and movement through the company encouraged.

The working environment itself has been designed to facilitate more collaboration; there are long tables in the canteen so workers from different departments can sit together.

How Google recruits

Google employs 600 people globally who just focus on recruitment, and every year the company hires thousands of new staff from millions of applications (not to mention the candidates it sources through its own searches).

“It’s such a huge volume, the obvious issue is how do you keep the bar high and keep it diverse?” explains Jamie Hinton, a senior recruiter.

There is also a lot of mythology around the hiring process at Google – that it runs endless selection rounds and asks questions such as: “You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. The blades start moving, what do you do?” – but Hinton says this is no longer the case. “The only value here is in making the interviewer feel smart. We want people to solve problems, but we’ll do that with role-related questions,” he says.

Managers who have worked at Google for more than six months get trained up in recruiting and it becomes a core part of their job. They receive template questions they can customise for different roles and are coached in recruiting against four key competencies: suitability for the role, leadership, cognitive ability and finally, their “Googliness”. The latter is judged through hypothetical interviewing, with questions such as: “How would you react if…?”

Data, data, data

With such a high volume of applications, the recruitment process at Google is hugely data driven. The company stores millions of CVs in its applicant tracking system (ATS); every interview has a scoring system so that hiring managers can run reports on people who have applied and how their score might map to a potential role.

In certain situations, this means it can bring people on board very quickly. Hinton gives the example of careers fairs in India where MBA graduates visit Google’s stand showing an interest, a group of resourcers in the background can then run a search on the ATS and on LinkedIn to see if they match up to requirements, hold an interview over Google Hangout and, in some cases, even make an offer on the same day.

Recruitment is just one example of a wider focus on big data in HR at Google. One of its senior vice-presidents, Prasad Setty, runs the company’s People Analytics department, which crunches the numbers on everything from the relative impact of speeding up the onboarding process to how to maximise every employee’s potential contribution.

Engagement

Like many organisations, Google has faced low response rates to engagement surveys (at one point around 30% or 40%), and has worked hard to turn this around. “Googlegeist”, as its annual engagement survey is known, is now taken by 93% of the employee population.


Aimee O’Malley, L&D business partner at Google Enterprise, discusses how to keep staff connected.

Aimee O’Malley, learning and development (L&D) business partner, says a combination of fast feedback and being seen to respond to people’s concerns has driven up response rates. “One of the issues raised was that people weren’t aware of the resources available to help them develop their career, so we launched an ‘Optimise your career’ programme.”

In building engagement, Google also focuses on the traits that make a good manager, through a programme called Project Oxygen.

This drew on the results of engagement surveys and other sources to identify eight key attributes that made effective managers – such as communication, not micromanaging, and focusing on team members’ career development.

“Managers are resourcers not bosses, they facilitate and coach,” says Matthews.

Would it work for you?


Monica Parker, workplace director at Morgan Lovell, discusses what drives individual instincts and behaviour to understand how to create an atmosphere that supports authentic collaboration.

There’s no debating that the HR setup at Google works for Google – it continues to rank top of Forbes’ best places to work list and is bombarded with speculative applications every day. But replicating this in an organisation with different business goals and a slower growth curve might end in chaos.

Monica Parker, workplace director at workplace consultancy Morgan Lovell, says that one of the most useful lessons we can learn from the search engine giant is to build a culture of openness: “It’s about creating the opportunity for people to bump into each other – a space that empowers them to do the best they can.”

More video content from the Google event

Sign up to our weekly round-up of HR news and guidance

Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday

OptOut
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Watch Aimee O’Mally’s full talk on employee engagement (below), and watch an interview with Rachel Miller, founder and director of All Things IC, on the value of internal communication to smart organisations.


Jo Faragher

Jo Faragher has been an employment and business journalist for 20 years. She regularly contributes to Personnel Today and writes features for a number of national business and membership magazines. Jo is also the author of 'Good Work, Great Technology', published in 2022 by Clink Street Publishing, charting the relationship between effective workplace technology and productive and happy employees. She won the Willis Towers Watson HR journalist of the year award in 2015 and has been highly commended twice.

previous post
Covert recording during breaks in disciplinary and grievance hearings
next post
PT Awards profile: double victory for Virgin Money

You may also like

How neuroscience can unlock employee recognition

22 May 2025

Workers ‘wait and see’ as companies struggle to...

16 May 2025

Why fighting the DEI backlash is about PR...

9 May 2025

So what does the election of a new...

9 May 2025

Rumours during recruitment: how should HR respond?

9 May 2025

Teacher apprenticeship route to be tied to school...

9 May 2025

Preparing for a new era of workforce planning...

8 May 2025

British Steel to resume recruitment

8 May 2025

Prioritising performance management: Strategies for success (webinar)

8 May 2025

M&S pauses hiring as it deals with cyber...

2 May 2025

  • 2025 Employee Communications Report PROMOTED | HR and leadership...Read more
  • The Majority of Employees Have Their Eyes on Their Next Move PROMOTED | A staggering 65%...Read more
  • Prioritising performance management: Strategies for success (webinar) WEBINAR | In today’s fast-paced...Read more
  • Self-Leadership: The Key to Successful Organisations PROMOTED | Eletive is helping businesses...Read more
  • Retaining Female Talent: Four Ways to Reduce Workplace Drop Out PROMOTED | International Women’s Day...Read more

Personnel Today Jobs
 

Search Jobs

PERSONNEL TODAY

About us
Contact us
Browse all HR topics
Email newsletters
Content feeds
Cookies policy
Privacy policy
Terms and conditions

JOBS

Personnel Today Jobs
Post a job
Why advertise with us?

EVENTS & PRODUCTS

The Personnel Today Awards
The RAD Awards
Employee Benefits
Forum for Expatriate Management
OHW+
Whatmedia

ADVERTISING & PR

Advertising opportunities
Features list 2025

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Linkedin


© 2011 - 2025 DVV Media International Ltd

Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • Brightmine
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Free trial
    • Request a quote
  • Webinars
  • Advertise
  • OHW+