What every Company should Learn from Google when it comes to Hiring

Even as Google has applicants touting perfect GPAs from Ivy League schools round the year, it's not college degrees this company looks for while hiring talent. The reason is simple - a degree doesn’t tell them much about talent or grit as skills and experience - a crucial fact most companies often tend to overlook.

Further validating why skills are more important than a college degree is the announcement Ernst & Young made last year - it said we will no longer require new hires to have a college degree. WOW! The decision came after an internal 18-month study of 400 employees which found little evidence that academic success was correlated with how well new hires performed on the job.

If you're still not convinced employers, go through these lines by the Google's hiring head, and everything will start to make a lot of sense:

You don’t need a college degree to be talented “When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people,” Laszlo Bock says.

Demonstrate a skill, not an expertise College degrees are, almost by definition, a certificate of expertise. A degree in journalism is a giant badge meant to tell the world that you know at least a little bit about the trade of telling stories and interviewing people. But a degree really doesn’t say what a graduate can do. Can they present an idea in front of a crowd? Can they build a website? Can they think interestingly about problems, or did they just pass some tests?

Prove grit “It looks like the thing that separates out the capable students from the really successful ones is not so much their knowledge…but their persistence at something,” Google chairman, Eric Schmidt said.

Apparently, Google would rather mold someone with grit rather than someone who is a lazy high-achiever.

Focus on skills “My belief is not that one shouldn’t go to college … most don’t put enough thought into why they’re going and what they want to get out of it,” Block said.

So folks, if you want a job at Google (or some other prestigious company), don’t focus so much on your major, and make sure you graduate with all the skills and experiences you need to do awesome things in the world.