Ryan Tate of Silicon Valley Insider
quotes Google's director of research Peter Norvig:
One
of the interesting things we've found, when trying to predict how well
somebody we've hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year
or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the
company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews.
We rank people from one to four [one being the worst], and if you got a
one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of
success.
Tate notes elsewhere in his piece that the Google interview process involves
crazy questions.
Tate doesn't connect the dots, but asking those sorts of questions in a
job interview is essentially a way of giving a prospective employee a
de facto IQ test (giving actual IQ tests to prospective employees has been legally problematic since
Griggs v. Duke Power). Back to Googler Peter Norvig:
Ninety-nine
percent of the people who got a one in one of their interviews we
didn't hire. But the rest of them, in order for us to hire them
somebody else had to be so passionate that they pounded on the table
and said, "I have to hire this person because I see something in him..."
My guess at what's going on here: creativity probably increases directly with IQ
up to a certain point,
at which it peaks and then declines. So if you are looking for an
employee who's going to come up with the next killer app or new line of
business for your company, and you hire only the candidates with the
highest IQs, you are probably overshooting the IQ sweet spot where
you'd find the smart, creative types.