Google is one of the world’s largest and most renowned corporations. Due to its massive success, Google is under a constant observation as a source of impactful practices and innovative approaches. This paper is focused on the exploration of Google’s human resources practices such as recruitment and selection.
One of the primary features of Google is the corporation’s international structure. To be more precise, tens of offices of Google can be found all around the globe in about forty countries (Google Company, n.d.). In that way, it is possible to image that the workforce of the corporation is highly international. This type of workforce requited a wide range of diverse HR management, recruitment, and selection practices suitable for the different countries and cultures.
In order to attract human resources of the highest quality, the corporation employs a set of practices. In particular, the company’s HR needs are fulfilled with the help of such internal recruitment sources as transfers, internship programs, and promotions (Lombardo, 2015). In addition, Google HR authorities also rely on the external sources of recruitment such as educational institutions where they target the most gifted and promising graduates and job advertisements that can be located on the web page of the company in the section titled Careers (Lombardo, 2015). Two of the latter recruitment strategies can also be recognized as direct and indirect. To be more precise, recruitment by means of the placement of job advertisements on the web page can be referred to as an indirect method whereas locating and contacting the potential job candidates at their educational institutions is recognized as a direct method of recruitment (Lombardo, 2015).
Since the company’s major generic strategy is differentiation, its recruitment approaches are focused on the selection of people whose skills and goals are aligned with the company’s organizational culture and mission (Thompson, 2016). In particular, the selection criteria of Google do not take into consideration the length of the candidates’ work experience. Instead, the most relevant features of the job seekers for Google include creativity, focus on constant improvement, smartness, and intellect (Lombardo, 2015). Apart from the job interviews, the selection practices employed by Google include background checks, workplace testing (mainly used for the positions filled externally), and preliminary screening.
Moreover, Google has a set of practices that help the company hire the best people regardless of the countries and cultures. These practices involve setting a bar very high, finding people individually, offering good reasons for the candidates to seek jobs at Google, establishing hiring committees with multiple competent members (Feloni, 2016).
From the research, it seems that Google applies a set of universal standards for all of its locations. However, since the overall workforce is multicultural, it is possible to assume that Google faces challenges presented by the need to incorporate the diverse offices into a single culture. An alternative course of action would be a strict differentiation between offices and the establishment of a patched culture with adjustments to each location. However, this course of action is not recommended because it would create the internal tension between different branches. Doing this research, I learned that the companies as large and influential as Google serve as the drivers of globalization when they do not differentiate between cultures but unite their peculiarities into a homogenous organizational philosophy that is based on the pursuit of excellence, innovation, and constant improvement.
References
Feloni, R. (2016). Google’s HR boss explains the company’s 4 rules for hiring the best employees.
Google Company. (n.d.). Google locations. Web.
Lombardo, J. (2015). Google’s HRM: Recruitment, selection, retention.
Thompson, A. (2016). Google’s generic strategy & intensive growth strategies.