Psst....Want To Know How Your Hiring Strategy Compares With Google's? Or how going down a rabbit hole can lead to new knowledge in an unexpected area

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.

Feet Planted

Get carried away by this lyrical piece written by a junior student of Santa Teresa High...

                                 

            Feet Planted

       By Gursharan Summan

I’d like to go to a place where the water tastes sweeter than life itself.
A place where sobriety and intoxication become one, where nonsense is reality, and it seems like it’s only the confusing things that make any kind of sense; where the mountains all howl into the night, producing low brassy notes that send an earthy vibration throughout your whole body, where sound meets touch and together create a unified sensation, and it makes your skin jitter and your body numb, and the notes hit the stars and send them jittering, too, making the stars also numb, and a brassy echo reverberates until it finally fades away and leaves behind a floating and empty sky.
A place where life and death become as apparent as day and night: where the stars aren’t actually stars at all, but just a billion little sperm cells, white tadpoles, stirring and swimming, squirming every which way through that oceanic black void that we call night; where the moon is an egg, waiting to be given its seed, well-deserved, much longed-for,—the moon, the most beautiful yet lonely creature in existence; where the sun is the embryo, a celestial heartbeat, thumping, growing, and evolving within its own little membrane-universe, brightening up the day with the intense luminance of life.
A place where I can sit alongside a river and peacefully observe, with my mouth shut, my thoughts tame, my ears keen and sharp, and my eyes wide open; and I can watch the water stream right on by, and I can hear the faint gurgle of that water, rushing over nearby rocks, and I choose not to get up, but just to sit, because I’m okay.
I’d like to go to a place where everything slows down enough, where timelessness becomes apparent enough, and everything makes sense enough for me to experience the moment and see the thing in itself, to not have to open my mouth, but still say all that was waiting to be said.

P.S. Thank you Gursharan for letting me publish this wonderful piece on my blog. You have a gift for imagery which you should develop on. Looking forward to future pieces such as this.