MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — HOW’S my kid going to get a job? There are few questions I hear more often than that one. In February, I interviewed Laszlo Bock,
who is in charge of all hiring at Google — about 100 new hires a week —
to try to understand what an employer like Google was looking for and
why it was increasingly ready to hire people with no college degrees.
Bock’s remarks generated a lot of reader response, particularly his
point that prospective bosses today care less about what you know or
where you learned it — the Google machine knows everything now — than
what value you can create with what you know. With graduations
approaching, I went back to Google to ask Bock to share his best advice
for job-seekers anywhere, not just at Google. Here is a condensed
version of our conversations:
You’re not saying college education is worthless?
“My
belief is not that one shouldn’t go to college,” said Bock. It is that
among 18- to 22-year-olds — or people returning to school years later —
“most don’t put enough thought into why they’re going, and what they
want to get out of it.” Of course, we want an informed citizenry, where
everyone has a baseline of knowledge from which to build skills. That is
a social good. But, he added, don’t just go to college because you
think it is the right thing to do and that any bachelor’s degree will
suffice. “The first and most important thing is to be explicit and
willful in making the decisions about what you want to get out of this
investment in your education.” It’s a huge investment of time, effort
and money and people should think “incredibly hard about what they’re
getting in return.”
Once
there, said Bock, make sure that you’re getting out of it not only a
broadening of your knowledge but skills that will be valued in today’s
workplace. Your college degree is not a proxy anymore for having the
skills or traits to do any job.
What
are those traits? One is grit, he said. Shuffling through résumés of
some of Google’s 100 hires that week, Bock explained: “I was on campus
speaking to a student who was a computer science and math double major,
who was thinking of shifting to an economics major because the computer
science courses were too difficult. I told that student they are much
better off being a B student in computer science than an A+ student in
English because it signals a rigor in your thinking and a more
challenging course load. That student will be one of our interns this
summer.”
Or,
he added, think of this headline from The Wall Street Journal in 2011:
“Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay.” This was an article
about a student who switched from electrical and computer engineering to
a major in psychology. She said she just found the former too difficult
and would focus instead on a career in public relations and human
resources. “I think this student was making a mistake,” said Bock, even
if it meant lower grades. “She was moving out of a major where she would
have been differentiated in the labor force” and “out of classes that
would have made her better qualified for other jobs because of the
training.”
