Psst....Want To Know How Your Hiring Strategy Compares With Google's?

Start with searching for a list of all-time high stocks.

Discover a website called alltimehighstocks.com.

On all-timehighstocks.com, find Braden Glett’s Five Minute Investing.

Get excited about stocks currently at an all-time high like AAPL, IBM, KO, MCD, FOSL, IDXX, HAL & ISRG.

Then get fearful (whites of the eyes fearful) and google “dangers of investing in 52 week high stocks”.

On Page 3 of the Google search results for “dangers of investing in 52 week high stocks”, look for the link which reads The 52-Week High and Momentum Investing and click on it.

It will take you to assymetricinvestmentreturns.com.

This is where serendipity takes over…

Run your eyes down assymetricinvestmentreturns’ article list.

Click on the headline “Illusory Superiority”.

Read Illusory Superiority till you find reference to the Lake Wobegon effect.

Open a new browser tab and google “Lake Wobegon”.

In the search results, click on the Wikipedia entry for Lake Wobegon.

Read this Wikipedia entry all the way through to the References and External Links at the bottom of the page.

Find the following in the External Links:

Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy, Peter Norvig, Google Research Blog.

Click on it.

Your journey is complete.

You will be directed to Google’s Research Blog and the entry by Peter Norvig on Google’s Lake Wobegon Hiring Strategy.

To be sure, Google is not the first company to adopt the Lake Wobegon strategy.

This quote, attributed to David Ogilvy (of Ogilvy & Mather fame &"The Man in the Hathaway Shirt" fame, and more), is the same idea in different clothes...

“If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants”

If you are a HR recruiter and enjoy reading articles connected with recruiting and hiring, you may also enjoy the HBR blog article 'The one interview question you should ask'. You can link to it here.

Also, if any of you readers want to explore each of the serendipitous links that took me from researching all-time high stocks to the discovery of Google’s Lake Wobegon Hiring Strategy, here they are in order:

The link for alltimehighstocks.com.

The link for Five Minute Investing.

The link for AssymetricInvestmentReturns.

The link for the Wikipedia article on Lake Wobegon.

And finally, the link for the Google Research Blog article by Peter Norvig - Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy.

P.S. As always, thanks for coming along on this journey with me.  Happy Reading.  And if you are a recruiter, Happy Recruiting.