A Google exec shares the 4 things he 'tests' every job candidate for

In a recent interview with Amit Singh, president of Google for Work, The New York Times' Adam Bryant asked: "How do you hire?"

Singh says the questions he always tries to answer are:

1. Is this candidate open?
2. Do I like them?
3.Does their style mesh with mine and the rest of the team?
4. And do they care about things beyond their own success?

"Those are things that are hard to test for," he tells Bryant. "You have to spend time with people to get to know them."

To figure out the answers to those four question, Singh says he typically does a lot of reference checks. "It's amazing what you'll find if you just are persistent and ask the right questions. And hiring for a specific role because they just did that role elsewhere is a good starting point, but I look at candidates much more broadly," he explains.

Singh says candidates trying to land a job at Google go through a set of interviews with a minimum of four different people. "That gives you diverse points of view and then you connect to see if this is the right person," he says. "Diversity of thought is actually the most invaluable thing in a business community. If we're always agreeing with each other, then we haven't gone down paths of debate that allow new ideas to emerge."

Read the full New York Times interview here.