Here's Why Google Ditched Brainteasers For Behavioral Interview Questions

Google used to be famously known for its brainteaser interview questions, such as, "How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane?"

Luckily for future Google interviewees, the tech giant has said in recent years that it's eliminated brainteaser questions because they don't work so well in hiring.

So what kind of interview questions does Google ask now?

According to Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of People Operations at Google, it's all about the behavioral interview questions.

"The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information," Bock tells the New York Times. "One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable 'meta' information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult."

An example of a behavioral interview question is: "Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem."

Bock says that structured behavioral interviews enables the interviewer to have "a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up."

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