Eric Schmidt on the optimal number of interviews

In the clip below, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt tells a story from the early days of Google where they interviewed a candidate 16 times and decided to not hire him.

Realizing they could no longer do this to people, Google declared that candidates couldn’t be interviewed more than a max of eight times.

But after some research, they discovered that each additional interviewer after the fourth increased decision accuracy by less than 1%.

In other words, after four interviews, the incremental cost of conducting additional interviews outweighs the value the additional feedback contributes to the ultimate hiring decision.

They have since revised their max interview policy to five for engineers and four for non-engineers.

If this policy is good enough for Google, it’s probably good enough for your startup!

I also really like paid trials/consulting as a way to assess interview candidates.

Full video: Greylock “Blitzscaling 08: Eric Schmidt on Structuring Teams and Scaling Google” (Oct 2015)

P.S. We’ve put together a YouTube playlist with every Eric Schmidt insight we’ve ever shared. You can watch it here: "Best startup advice from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt"