Google attracts lot of talents working together, but indeed few of them are working on new programs. The division of work team is too hard to break, which means that most of your time will be spent on improving small majorization or keeping stable. For willing young, working for Google means stable but sometimes boring. A great invention for you is a little improvement for Google. It’s easier to implement a new idea in a small company and get successful. This is also why many people leave Google to small startup companies.

1. WHY GOOGLE HAVING
UNIQUE HR PRACTICES
STILL LEAD TO HIGH
TURNOVER?

2. Company Profile
Founders : Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Incorporation : September 4, 1998
Initial public offering: (NASDAQ), August 19, 2004
Headquarters: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain
View, CA 94043
CEO: Sunil Pichai (2015)
Parent Company: Alphabet
Brand Value: $82.5 Billion (Oct 2016)
Vision: “to provide access to the world’s information in one
click.”
Mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it
universally accessible and useful.”
Best Companies to Work For and Google is #1 Forbes List (7 Times in 10 Year)
#2 Most Valuable Brand on Forbes List 2016

3. PROBLEM STATEMENT
WHY GOOGLE UNIQUE HR PRACTICES
STILL LEAD TO HIGH TURNOVER?

4. Google’s SWOT Analysis
● Strengths
○ Web Search Engines / Video Sharing
/ Online Advertising / Mobile OS /
Web Browser
○ High Level R&D expenditures
○ Valued Brand
○ Work Culture
○ Talented and Creative Employees
● Weaknesses
○ Revenue’s Over dependence on
Advertising
○ Violation of User’s Privacy
○ Copyright Infringement
○ Diversity and Gender Equity
● Opportunities
○ IoT
○ Big Data
● Threats
○ Government Investigations and New Laws
○ Reliability/UX of Android decreasing
○ Web Security
○ Attrition

5. Research Methodology & Data Collection
1)Systematic & Exploratory research
1)Data collection:
a) Secondary Sources: Annual Report, Wolframalpha, Statista, News,
b) Glassdoor, Payscale, Forum, Emails from ex-google

6. Google Revenue Per Employee
Source: www.wolframalpha.com

7. Bought Motorola
Infinity
(19K employees)
5,383 Layoff
at Motorola
Motorola Sold to
Lenovo
Layoff at Doubleclick
Layoff of recruiters,
sales
Source: www.wolframalpha.com
Year 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Employee 10674 16805 20222 19835 24400 32467 53861 47756 53600 61814

8. Our Analysis: Why do Googlers resign?
Psychological reasons
○ Lack of sense of accomplishment, challenge
and belonging
○ Lack of personal opportunity
○ Wasting the product of 20% self- driven time
System reasons
○ Complex structure
○ Inefficient hiring process
○ Many meetings and reviews
○ Slow decision and reaction

9. GOOGLE’S
MAJOR GREY
AREA
“Google’s Brain Drain”

10. Google’s Brain Drain
High profile departures from Google:
Marissa Mayer, Google's first female engineer, worked at the company from 1999 to 2012 quit and
became CEO of Yahoo
Android VP Hugo Barra left Google in 2013 and became the international of VP of rising Chinese
smartphone maker Xiaomi, the most valuable start-up in the world.
In 2014, Google+ chief Vic Gundotra, the man who was supposed to help Google "get" social,
abruptly left the company
In the same year, Nikesh Arora, Google's chief business officer, also left to head SoftBank's Internet
and Media business
In October 2014, Andy Rubin, the co-founder of Android, resigned to create an incubator for
hardware start-ups
A month later, Tom Fallows, the head of product search and delivery service Google Express, left
to work at Uber
In February 2015, Google's SVP of Knowledge Alan Eustace retired
In May 2015, Google PR boss Rachel Whetstone left to Head PR operations at Uber
In the same month, Google's VP of shopping and travel Sameer Samat was lured away by fitness
tracker maker Jawbone

11. Why is it a big issue?
Google facing
strong rivals like
Amazon and
Facebook
Anti-Android
movement called
Android Open
Source Project
(AOSP)
The brightest stars
of Google were in
charge of dealing
with these issues
High turnover rates in the
lower ranks means that it
could be tough to find
ideal leaders to steer
those struggling
businesses in the right
direction
Employees in the
lower ranks also
quit

12. Reasons for the
Brain Drain
Google doesn’t feel as entrepreneurial as it used to.
Google hires the best of people but there are only
limited top management roles.
Most of the employees have spent a long time at Google
and are looking for new opportunities.
What Google is
doing to handle it?
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has formed Area 120
Employees submit business plan
If selected employees get to work full time on the project
Benefit for Google: Promote and strengthen
intrapreneurship, risk-taking, and out of the box thinking.
Rapidly develop new products and business models
Problem: Relatively easy to raise funds in Silicon Valley and
the idea of doing it alone may seem tempting

13. 1) Google based it interview on Trick Question and they admitted they were waste of time.
2) Relying more on Grades and SAT Scores.
Solution: Integrated Behavioural, Cases and Domain knowledge in their interview & less rely on SAT
scores
Solution to the problems - “Company Wise”
1. Observation: Attrition rate was particularly high among new mothers therefore improved the
maternity and paternity policies
Solution: Google offers paid maternity leave ranging from 18 to 22 weeks. Fathers and adoptive parents receive 7
weeks of paid leave. Employees also receive a cash gift for a child's birth.
Problem 1. Biased towards people with fancy degrees while hiring….
Problem 2. Attrition rate was particularly high among new mothers (2013)

14. In January 2009, Google laid off 100 recruiters and In February, the company cut another 40 positions
when it closed its radio advertising efforts.
Omid Kordestani, Google’s senior vice president for global sales and business development, said
“The cuts were meant to address mistakes the company had made during its phase of rapid growth. “
Solution: - Laid-off workers will be given time to apply for other jobs within the company.
Google changed some basic hiring processes based on their experimentation and analysis.
In 2006, it was taking somewhere between six and nine months to get hired. In Work Rules! Laszlo Bock
credits then-staffing analyst Todd Carlisle with discovering that four interviews were sufficient to predict
with 86% confidence whether or not the company should hire someone.
Solution: The company then instituted this “Rule of Four,”. (Technical Staffing org had the average down to
about 5-6 weeks, and today, clear hire cases generally make it through in ~3 weeks)
Problem 3: Google Layoffs (2009)
Problem 4: HIRING PROCESS WAS TOO LENGTHY

15. Celebrating performance through evaluation cycles (quarterly, semiannually, annually) creates a sense that
every day work does not matter.
Even data-rich, data-loving companies shy away from being transparent about how they arrive at
individual ratings which produces a perception of arbitrary assessment and a false notion of
precision
Solution: Google has abolished numerical ratings in April 2014, so each Googler are now subjected to a
five-point scale ranging from “needs improvement” to “superb”. Carried out semi-annually, peer
reviewers are asked to state one thing the reviewee should do more of and one thing that they can do in a
different way.
Apart from quarterly, semi-annually and annually conducted performance reviews, what Google can achieve
next is enabling continuous feedback between peers
Problem 5. Google Performance Reviews (2014)

16. Solution: Bock has also brought his Analytical approach to evaluating existing employees, managers and
teams.
Problem 6: People Operation for Performance Management

17. Solution to the Problems “Our Own Ideas”
Problem : “The median employee tenure at Google is just more than one year.”
Google and its peers aren't necessarily wasting money on Arcadian job environments for intelligent Y-ers who do not
stick around. The companies’s business performance is proof to the contrary
Eastman Kodak which had an average tenure of 20yrs and median age of 50 yrs showed an return on assets of
negative 12%.
Solution:
Superior Stock Rewards
Life-Work Balance

18. Problem: HR Practice: Hire Only Smart People
Google hires best of the people, which caused:
1) People are underutilized and over qualified (esp for Adwords Team)
2) Everyone is smart that it is hard to lay impact upon
3) Little less workforce diversity. Google is hiring same people with same background.
Solution: Hiring process to accommodate candidates with diverse background and hiring as per qualification
required for the assigned job.
Problem: Mediocre Level Manager
1) Scanning through the comments of ex employees, we found google give more on engineering talents at mid-
level and managers do not possess managerial and soft skills. Many ex-googlers were dissatisfied with their
managers.
2) People Leave Managers, Not Companies.
Solution: Develop Leadership within Manager's (Google company of Engineers -> Need to develop good managers)

19. Problem: Too much appraise
As a result of the fun of work itself, the reward to previous work efforts is inherent. However, with
the external reward (Eg, wages, bonuses) increasing, it may reduce the level of individual motivation.
--<Organizational Behavior: Managing People and Organizations>,Stephen P.Robbins
Solution: Set some restrictions on free facilities, Flexible and rolling appraise
Problem: Competitive Hiring Process (Hiring right people in the right position)
Google hires the smartest and talented people in all their job requirements.
"There are students from top 10 colleges who are providing tech support for Google's ad products, or manually taking down flagged
content from YouTube, or writing basic code to A|B test the color of a button on a site," the ex-employee says.
Solution: Google should look for people whose job profile matches job specific requirement while hiring the employees.

20. Lessons to be learnt from
Google
Lesson 1: Just because you value talent doesn’t mean you have to cater to
individual “stars.” (What if smart people are overrated?) “the dark side of
charisma.”
Lesson 2: If you want to keep great contributors, develop better managers.
Lessons 3: Just because people leave doesn’t mean they’re gone for good.
(Your former employees (alumni) can be a powerful source of future
business.)
CONCLUSION:

21. Appendix: Voices of Ex Google Employees
1. They can hire the very best people — so *everyone* is overqualified.
2. Google company of Engineers -> Need to develop good managers.
3. Focused merely on Mountain View.
4. The bureaucracy and authoritarian “gods of coding rules and regulations” - Managers
5. Expectation of People with google is high
6. Avoid hiring creative writing/art/film production majors into highly structured and highly interpersonal roles
like HR
7. Aggressive Growth Lead to uninformed managers, issues of staffs.(Mangers Training)
8. Work/life balance. (I've never met anybody at Google who actually [took] time off on weekends or on
vacations.)
9. People are promoted into management positions — not because they actually know how to lead/manage, but

22. REFERENCES
❖ http://fortune.com/worlds-most-admired-companies/alphabet-2/
❖ https://www.yahoo.com/news/google-employees-confess-worst-things-125950258.html?ref=gs
❖ https://hbr.org/2010/11/getting-smarter-about-googles
❖ http://blog.idonethis.com/google-performance-reviews/
❖ http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/at/Documents/human-capital/hc-trends-2015.pdf
❖ http://valleywag.gawker.com/eric-schmidt-personally-ruined-google-employees-review-1587309422
❖ https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-07-29/why-are-google-employees-so-disloyal-
❖ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/performance-management-google-steffen-maier
❖ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/google-plans-to-lay-off-200-workers/?_r=1
❖ http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/05/30/why-cant-google-inc-keep-its-top-talent.aspx
❖ http://www.payscale.com/data-packages/employee-loyalty/least-loyal-employees
❖ http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-20-percent-time-policy-2015-4?r=US&IR=T
❖ http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/09429.pdf
❖ http://www.hrzone.com/lead/culture/why-did-google-abandon-20-time-for-innovation
❖ http://www.millwardbrown.com/docs/default-source/global-brandz-downloads/global/financial-times_brandz-
2016-global-top-100_supplement.pdf

23. Prepared By: Shreya Singh | Sharanya Halady | Simeng Xu | Fernando Vianna | Adma Maharjan
2017