Is Google Losing its Appeal for Talent?
The Wall Street Journal posted a great article yesterday regarding Google’s increasing challenge to recruit and retain top talent. The article highlights three current challenges for Google:
- As their workforce continues its hypergrowth (currently over 12,000 employees), bureaucracy increases, decision-making slows, and the individual opportunity to have an impact lessens.
- Highly lucrative stock options are entering their final vesting period, taking the golden handcuffs off many employees hired 4-5+ years ago.
- A new generation of maturing start-ups (think Facebook) have become less risky and are attracting Google’s top talent by offering new opportunities and lucrative stock option packages.
Despite Google’s short term challenges, what I love about Google is top managements expressed priority around human capital. In the words of Laszlo Bock, VP of People Operations, “executives spend a lot of time thinking about how to attract and retain top talent as the company grows in size.”
Additionally, Google has gone one step further to express the human capital impact on financial results…
“The company acknowledges that creative and entrepreneurial people are the core of its success — that’s one reason Google lavishes them with extravagant free food and other perks. “If we do not succeed in attracting excellent personnel or retaining or motivating existing personnel, we may be unable to grow effectively,” Google has acknowledged in regulatory filings.
Every company these days seems to want to be like Google. They can start by acting like them…
June 29th, 2007
1 Comment Add your own
1. laurence haughton | June 30th, 2007 at 10:12 am
When you write, “What I love about Google is top managements expressed priority around human capital,” I agree with you.
When you quote a Google exec, “Executives spend a lot of time thinking about how to attract and retain top talent as the company grows in size” I take him at his word.
But when you conclude, “Every company these days seems to want to be like Google. They can start by acting like them” I have to wonder what exactly are they doing? Not thinking, not talking, not crowing about perks that others have tested and found insufficient. What are they doing to keep talent after the stock options become less a goldmine and the inevitable bureaucracy (and management missteps) become a reason for defection?
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