Creating a culture like Google’s is easy. All you have to do is have to do is hire the right people, according to Liane Hornsey, Google’s company vice-president, people operations, sales and business development.

Speaking last month at the ‘The Talent Management Summit’, a conference organised by The Economist, Hornsey said that Google’s culture in which “the team is more important than the individual, and where we put the team first” was something that others could achieve. 

“The Google approach is easy to copy. All you have to do is hire fantastic people,” Hornsey told delegates. “The way that we sustain the culture is to hire people who are going to be accretive to the culture. Everything starts with hiring,” she said.  

Hornsey went on to outline key elements of Google’s approach:

• never hire somebody who you think might be just okay

• never hire just to put bums on seats 

• every recruit has to be interviewed by four or five different people. “If one person says they are not a good cultural fit, even if I love someone, I will not hire them,” she said

• even when hiring the most junior person, hire someone who has the potential to be a senior leader

• after hiring someone put them into a supportive team.

Hornsey explained that within Google any failure to recruit the right person for a particular role was regarded as a company failure rather than the individual’s failure to perform in that role.

It followed, therefore, that where an individual was not immediately successful in a specific role, they received help and support to switch to other roles. This process continued “until we get their performance up”, said Hornsey.

Hornsey said that Google tried to limit the number of specialists they hired in favour of “general athletes”. “If you have people that have general capacity, it allows them to rotate, and we can keep them happy and give them a broader experience,” she said.

Hornsey went on to highlight the financial cost of a bad hire. Based on an analysis of hiring in a CSR [corporate social responsibility] environment within Google, where staff stayed in post for an average of nine months, Hornsey said the the average cost to the company was £43k. “Imagine if I had someone for the role who stayed for five years,” she said. 

Hornsey advised the audience to carry out similar exercises in their own organisations to show their chief executives how good recruitment can save their organisation “a lot of money”.