Laszlo Bock: The would-be biologist who became an influential figure in HR

Laszlo Bock, head of "people operations" at Google, has an endearing way of going off-script that can be surprising for a person in his position. Hiring 5,000-10,000 of the smartest people on the planet each year is a pretty tough job, so you would not expect him to talk lightly about the talent.

For instance: "Women tend to have, on average, less of [the] sort of antisocial tendency that real 'brain on a stick' men tend to have."

We have got to this point because Mr Bock is trying to explain how it was that he came to apply a data-driven approach to making hiring decisions.

It sounds like a particularly Googley way of managing: to collect data on successful hires, do some analysis on what they have in common, and then turn it into an algorithm to aid future decisions.

But it also reflects Mr Bock's background as a consultant at McKinsey, where his analytical bent had full rein.

Arriving at Google back in 2006, a time when the company had relatively little in the way of a formal human resources (HR) function, left plenty of room for experimentation.

Beginning with a three-person analytics team, he set to work studying how to bring quantitative methods to hiring. The approach is now a core part of how Google manages its people - one reason, he says, why the company has fewer resources devoted to traditional HR functions such as training than other companies of its size.

Mr Bock has a way of drawing in a listener with a conspiratorial intimacy. We are in his office at Google's Mountain View headquarters to discuss Work Rules, the book he has just had published on Google's approach to HR.

But now he is sharing an example that has not been disclosed before, he promises.

In its first experiment, Google asked job candidate engineers to rate themselves on a scale of one to five. "It turned out that if you rated yourself as a five and you were a man, we should not hire you," he says (a reference to the aforementioned antisocial tendency, stemming from having an inflated view of the self).

"A man who rated himself a four . . . was more likely to be self-aware and kind of team-oriented and modest," he adds.

Statistically, the same does not apply to the other sex. "If you were a woman and rated yourself a five we should absolutely hire you because there's a societal pressure around women being self-effacing and more modest. For a woman to say she's a five, she's going to be amazing."

With insights like this, he says, Google now has "an application that generates statistically relevant questions for interviews".

The use of statistics has a way of turning social distinctions into stereotypes. But it has turned out to be a fruitful tool for handling hiring and promotions at the world's most valuable internet company.

Mr Bock credits his interest in the discipline to the influence of the late Dick Wittink, one of his professors at Yale University School of Management and to Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin by the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

"Then I got here and it was like: Oh my god, you can actually apply this to really complicated human problems and make people happier!"

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It turns out that happiness comes high on Google's list of aspirations for its staff. As in all companies, says Mr Bock, the initial joy new hires feel in their jobs fades over time. But some workers stay happier than others. Naturally, Google wants to find out why and has embarked on a 100-year study of work/life balance to find out more. Three years in, there is evidence of what the happy few have in common.

"We found they have a higher natural aptitude towards gratitude," says Mr Bock. "They just tend to go round the world being more grateful than the rest of us. So we're trying to train everyone else to express that gratitude, whether it's through mindfulness programmes or just telling people to write a nice note to everyone."

Seriously? It is at about this point that I think he has drunk the Google Kool-Aid. But gratitude turns out to be something the company screens for in its hiring process as well. "Humility and conscientiousness and appreciation of the things around you", says Mr Bock, are qualities that lessen the sense of entitlement workers in successful companies might otherwise develop.

"I don't think the tech industry, historically, has put a lot of value on the people side of things. There's been this myth of meritocracy and the lone inventor."

Despite the heavy emphasis on the quantitative, Mr Bock's thinking has a decidedly humanistic side. He credits John Doerr, the venture capitalist and Google director, with teaching him a style of interviewing that is geared to unearthing the deeply personal.

In Mr Doerr's notes, which Mr Bock read after interviewing candidates for the position of Google's chief financial officer, were post-interview observations such as "I think the motivation here is Catholic guilt stemming from something as a child," Mr Bock recalls.

Pretty soon, Mr Bock is interviewing me and getting me to blurt out embarrassing things I said to my university career adviser years ago. Once he has uncovered what my fantasy job was when I was young (poet), he confesses his own (a marine biologist) and suggests a pact: if one of us ever takes the plunge, the other has to as well. I stay silent, not wanting to sour the mood by pointing out that I had long outgrown my poetic ambitions.

It is hard to tell how much of this is learned behaviour - the necessary technique of a person whose job is people - and how much is innate. But his background and a quick empathy suggest it comes naturally.

<>Mr Bock has the sort of haphazard early career trajectory you might see on anyone's resume, only more so. There was a period waiting on tables and trying to be an actor, which included a part in Baywatch ("I played a lifeguard and got to run in slow motion").

There was a job in manufacturing (with a chain-smoking boss who was a "lunatic" and swore all the time). That was followed by night school, a stint in a management consultancy and then business school, each step taken to get away from the one before.

Mr Bock has little patience with the idea that the tech industry is one where a good idea and the willingness to work hard makes you a billionaire. It lacks balance, he notes, in terms of race, gender and age.

The main message of his book is aimed at employers: give people a mission they can relate to personally and enough control of how their jobs are structured and they will work miracles. Much is applicable to any job, he says.

What can others do to make their own companies more Google-like? "Hire by committee - anyone can do that," he says: averaging out several people's views overcomes the inevitable biases of even the best interviewer. Also, he adds, "hide the snacks that are least healthy."

But in the lift, a worker joins me pushing a cart loaded with cans of soda. Google, it seems, struggles to live up to its own high aspirations.

. . .

On the desk

One of the files that Google keeps on its own senior executives has a special mention of Laszlo Bock's favourite blue chair. The file is kept by the company's executive compensation team, he says, and is intended to ease what might otherwise be tense meetings.

"Compensation is always a charged topic," says Mr Bock. Turnover in the compensation team is high, so "they developed a dossier on every senior executive on how they like to interact."

Mr Bock, Google's head of human resources, says he only discovered the existence of the file when someone from the compensation team was in his office.

"They said: 'You're in that chair; it's going to be a long meeting. You always have lots of creative ideas when you're in that chair.'"

The chair in question is a ground-hugging recliner that looks too flimsy to lie back in. Climbing down into it is awkward, though it's surprisingly comfortable.

Staring at the ankles of others in the room leaves you feeling at a severe disadvantage. But Mr Bock says he likes to lie back in the chair during meetings. As long as the others sit, rather than stand, the height differential is not too stark.

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