Google is one of the world’s most attractive employers, according to a study by Universum, landing it some of the world’s most talented staff. But it’s not just the search giant’s name and reputation that is luring candidates. It’s the company’s role requirements, or lack thereof.
No longer do candidates require shiny resumes and cover letters complete with Ivy League accolades and years of direct experience. In fact, Google is finding top talent without any degrees or experience at all.
Google’s approach is similar to Elon Musk’s “two-hands test” to find top talent without a degree, but takes it a step further by eliminating the need for experience. With programs such as the Google Project Management Certificate, an online and self-paced professional certificate course that’s available for free through Coursera, Google is abolishing the traditional approach to staffing.
Upon the completion of its certification course, Google gives interested students a shot at one of its project management roles. Rather than analyzing candidates by their education or experience, the company measures aptitude by the quality of their coursework.
In return, what Google is finding is not just the world’s best project managers, but the project managers that have the exact skill sets it’s looking for to help take its teams to the next level.
It democratizes the employment landscape, and it’s doing so by employing three key components to finding truly top talent. Nearly any business can adopt the core framework behind the trillion-dollar company’s genius strategy to build better teams.
Discover Innovators By Casting a Wider Net
Google’s free project management certification course is effectively helping to make its project manager positions open to anyone. By eliminating the standard restrictions such as higher education and direct experience, it casts a much wider net on the potential candidate pool.
The reality is that there are a lot of professions that don’t require a degree to perform. Overlooking candidates without a degree in a certain field, or without a degree at all, can be detrimental to finding the best fit for a particular role within your organization.
Same goes, in many cases, with direct experience. There are instances where it is to an employer’s benefit that a candidate lacks prior experience in the field. This is especially true within innovative teams or organizations that don’t want things done the way they’ve always been done. Or when businesses are trying to stand out from their competition by doing things differently. Zero experience yields a tremendous amount of fresh perspective. In fact, according to Fast Company, one company found that employees who had no experience outperformed those who had 10 to 15 years of sales experience.
Prioritize the Assessment of Aptitude
Of course, obtaining a higher volume of applicants isn’t the goal, but finding the best candidate for a role. And so it wouldn’t aid in Google’s efforts to have more applicants to sort through if it didn’t have a way to field candidates and gauge fit. The reason why its free online training course is genius is because it serves as a portfolio for applicants.
What this means for Google is a tremendous amount of insight into every applicant from a collection of completed assignments. The result is that every applicant is able to provide a portfolio showcasing their work, thought processes, leadership styles, and communication skills. More importantly, the course effectively mimics the role, indicating a candidate’s aptitude for a position.
On a small scale, this is where businesses of just about any size can use screening questions to field incoming candidates and test projects to assess final candidates. Similar to Google’s project management course, something as simple as screening questions give you additional insights about candidates during the application process, while also providing information about them that you can use to compare apples to apples.
Invest in Employee Training
A formal education doesn’t necessarily mean someone is ready to hit the ground running, and neither does prior experience. Every business operates differently, so no matter what sort of role you’re hiring for, employers need to invest in employee training. Which, given candidates with the right aptitude, eliminates the need for candidates to have specific education and experience requirements.
Granted, the average business is not in the position to create a free online certification course like Google. However, there are ways to optimize the hiring process to prioritize aptitude over education or experience. A quick way to do that is to place more emphasis on training new employees the way you want them to function, as opposed to taking on new employees and having them work how their former employer trained them to.
After all, if you want to stand out in your market and apart from your competition, you’re going to have to do things differently. And for many, that means acquiring talent with a high degree of aptitude and a fresh perspective. Limiting your talent pool to a seasoned staff with a formal education and years of experience in the field is a quick way to limit your team’s ability to innovate, and limit your business’s ability to differentiate itself in a crowded market.
