Finished (Paper Book) - "Are You Smart Enough To Work at Google" - William Poundstone

As a book of clever problems and puzzles, I liked "Are You Smart Enough To Work at Google" by William Poundstone.  Many of the problems presented would have left me in a coma, but going through the answers, there did seem to be certain ways to step back and examine the tenets of the problem, some of which you can actually take strides to solve.

However, as a book about HR and hiring practices, the book actually left me depressed.  I've never had a great love of HR interviewing techniques, as they all seem so idiosyncratic, an often are based only on applicants proving that they respect the hiring process.

From my view, from both sides of the table, I consider interviews an examination of whether or not the applicant and the corporation are a mutual fit - a two-way street.  As such, there should be a level of openness and honesty in the conversation, with the HR role, of course, making sure that the applicant has the required background skills/knowledge (largely gained from the resume and work history), but primarily focusing the interviews on the much more important "fit" characteristics.  Excellent candidates who expect to work in a team environment won't work out well in an isolated environment and vice-versa.  Highly political environments favour some candidate profiles over others.

Doing problems of the type explored in Poundstone's book merely shows that HR folk don't have any science to fall back on.  Their real value of assessing candidates on fit/personality and making sure that processes are fair to candidates (e.g. not swayed by friendships or biases) is a key role, but doesn't seem to be one that HR folk hang their hats on.  Doing "trick questions" may be fun, and in some cases may provide some illumination on particular personality characteristics (e.g. frustration tolerance, ability to deal with incomplete instructions), but these can be dealt with more honestly and directly through more conventional means.

I fully understand that Google has many more applicants than it can possibly deal with, but doing an unreliable selection methodology seems quite "un-Googly".