Laszlo Bock, the head of human resources at Google, made quite a splash with his announcement last year that the technology firm has changed the way it hires people.
Gone are the brainteaser-style interview questions that so many candidates abhorred. But also gone, it would seem, is any concern with discovering how smart applicants really are. "GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. … We found that they don't predict anything," Bock told the New York Times.
Let's take Bock at his word and assume that the data-obsessed firm has crunched the numbers rigorously and found that the test scores of the people it hires really don't predict how well they perform once they are on the job. If Google ranked its new hires by their SAT scores, and found that those in the bottom 10 percent of the list performed just as well as those in the top 10 percent, would it mean that traditional measures of intelligence are useless in the business world?
Unfortunately for Bock and his admirers, who range from Thomas Friedman to Rush Limbaugh, the answer is no, and most other firms would be making a mistake to follow Google's lead.
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