Google Discourages Culture Fit in Hiring With ‘Googleyness’ Update

When Google interviews job candidates, it has long considered a handful of attributes, including the applicants’ leadership, knowledge about the roles they are applying for and “general cognitive ability.” But in a move little noticed outside the company, Google has clarified the definition of the most sacred of those attributes—a collection of qualities it calls “Googleyness”—to avoid bias in hiring, The Information has learned.

Google says the term still means what it has always meant—including an ability to thrive in ambiguity, value feedback and challenge the status quo—but it has quietly added language to an internal hiring guide that instructs employees to “avoid confusing Googleyness with culture fit, which can leave room for bias.” While subtle, the change represents a rare tweak to the hiring principles of a Silicon Valley giant that has long boasted about the uniqueness of its corporate culture. Increasingly though, the company has come under criticism for a lack of diversity in its workforce, along with hiring practices that could exclude people who don’t fit the traditional mold of a Google employee.

The Takeaway

‘Googleyness’ doesn’t equal culture fit, search giant says
Google updated internal hiring guide with new language in 2017
Culture fit increasingly seen as an impediment to diversity

The concept of culture fit was once openly embraced as a hiring principle by tech companies, many of which obsessively cultivate a mix of corporate traditions, attitudes and workplace policies that they view as a key advantage. The concept, though, has fallen out of favor at a growing number of employers, where it is increasingly seen as a tool for hiring people who simply mirror existing employee populations.

“When you’re a really big company, prioritizing for culture becomes a tool for exclusion,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington and author of “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,” a recent book about the origins of the tech industry. “Even if the people on the hiring side truly believe that they are not biased, we all are. We’re human beings.”

Google maintains that it never officially made culture fit a hiring priority and, in training sessions for interviewers, instructed employees to avoid considering the concept when assessing candidates.

In practice though, the term Googleyness became essentially interchangeable with the concept of culture fit, multiple current Google employees said. The association between the two was tight enough among its employees that it prompted Google to clarify the language in its internal hiring guide, a change that occurred in 2017, according to a company spokesperson.

But even though it occurred two years ago, it isn’t clear how widely understood the change is within Google. One current employee said the company had eliminated the concept of Googleyness entirely as a hiring concept, but Google said that isn’t the case. Several other employees said they were unaware of any clarification the company had made to the official definition of Googleyness.

Inclusive Cultures

The effort to diminish the role of culture fit in hiring comes at a delicate time for Google. In April, the company agreed to settle a class action lawsuit filed by hundreds of former job applicants who alleged that the search giant discriminated against them because of their age, declining to hire them because it viewed them as too old. In documents related to the suit, which was originally filed in 2015, the plaintiffs alleged that Googleyness or cultural fit are euphemisms for youth.

Although it agreed to settle the case for $11 million, the company denied that it discriminated against applicants on the basis of age.

The lack of diversity in the work forces of tech companies—which mostly employ white and Asian men—has become a high-profile issue in recent years. At Google last year, 66.8% of its global workforce were men while 43.9% of its U.S. employees were Asian and 48.5% were white, the company said in its 2018 diversity report.

While its diversity reports don’t disclose age-related information, 2016 data from PayScale, a compensation software company, estimated the median age of Google employees was 30 years old, more than a decade younger than the national average for employed Americans.

Instead of looking for culture fit, tech companies like Google have begun using the term “inclusive culture” in the past several years, as they step up efforts to recruit people from underrepresented groups.

‘When you’re a really big company, prioritizing for culture becomes a tool for exclusion.’

“What makes for good innovation and a good team is having diverse opinions, diverse experience and diverse ways of thinking,” said Melinda Briana Epler, founder and CEO of Change Catalyst, a consulting firm that advises companies on diversity practices. “So a lot of companies are looking to ‘culture add’ instead of ‘culture fit.’ You want somebody that adds something to your culture that you don’t already have.”

The emphasis on hiring for culture fit inside tech companies was likely an outgrowth of the fixation on being able to move quickly among startups, the University of Washington’s O’Mara believes. Now though, Google is far from the garage startup it was in 1998. At the end of September, Alphabet—the parent company of Google—had more than 114,000 global employees, compared to nearly 20,000 a decade earlier.

“Out of necessity in the startup phase, you kind of have to be around people you get along with,” O’Mara said.

Google’s storied culture has been roiled over the past year for other reasons. A year ago, over 20,000 Google employees walked off the job temporarily to protest the company’s handling of harassment cases involving former executives. Since then, tensions over Google’s ambitions in China and work with controversial U.S. government agencies exposed further tensions within the company.

‘Googleyness’ as a Weapon

Googleyness existed as a loose concept since the company’s earliest days, translating roughly as smart and nice, in its simplest form. But around 2007 Google’s senior vice president of people at the time, Laszlo Bock, was among the people at the company who decided the company needed a more codified definition because he was beginning to see employees use it as a tool of exclusion.

“There was a dynamic where people started to use the word Googley as kind of a weapon. ‘Oh, you know, I don’t like your behavior and therefore you’re not Googley,’” Bock said in a recent interview with The Information. “You see that in companies that have strong cultures where [employees] try to say, ‘Well, other people, they don’t adhere to the culture in one way or another,’ which is again, why it was so important to define it.”

According to a book Bock wrote about the inner workings of Google, he helped formally define Googleyness and make it part of the company’s official hiring criteria. At the time, it meant enjoying fun, intellectual humility, conscientiousness, comfort with ambiguity and having taken a courageous or interesting path in life.

In 2012, according to a company spokesperson, Google revised the definition slightly to include new qualities such as caring for the team and putting the user first. It eliminated enjoying fun and interesting life paths from the definition. Then in 2017, it modified the language further when it sought to decouple the term from culture fit.

Google has made other changes to its quirky hiring process in the past. In 2012, the company did away with asking candidates brainteasers, like “How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?” or “Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.” Bock later told the New York Times the questions were a “waste of time” and served mostly “to make the interviewer feel smart.” Around that time, Google also stopped asking candidates their grade point averages and test scores, except for those who were recently graduated.