Inside a lobby at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, beside a rank of 1990s arcade machines, a laminated sign asks people to “Please Be Googley”. It is a request that visitors remember to wear security badges; also that they don’t steal any of the stuff that’s been left around for staff enjoyment – pedal bikes, sombreros, electric guitars. Employees at this £250bn company get stock options as a basic condition of employment. Wacky office furnishings, too. Upstairs in what Google calls its people operations department – human resources – there’s a climbing frame. A gym machine. Most sit at desks, today, frowning and purposeful, but one young staffer has taken a laptop to an indoor picnic table, next to the hammock.
In his office, Laszlo Bock, head of people operations, handles the claims from outsiders asking: “Please let me be Googley.” Each year, around 2 million apply for a job here and 5,000 are hired. Bock puts the average applicant’s odds at about 400/1. On a wall he keeps a small display of some of the worst (Bock prefers “silliest”) submissions that have come in. People try to grease him, impress him, plead with him, threaten him. He was offered, once, a discount on a motorhome in return for an offer. And somebody mailed in a shoe; with this foot-in-the-door joke the hope, presumably, that an acceptance letter would be sent by return post.
Bock is 43, big-jawed, handsome, once an extra on Baywatch and still with the straight-backed bearing of a screen lifeguard. He joined Google six years ago, when the brand was on its evolution from agreeable little search engine to terrifyingly ambitious everything-engine: email, maps, operating systems, phones, soon a phone network. Six years ago the company had 6,000 staff and now it is 50,000-strong – “the size of a respectable city,” as Bock points out, one made up of engineers, designers, marketers, lawyers, administrators, chefs and many of their dogs, who are welcome on site. If founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin settled this city, and executive chairman Eric Schmidt serves as mayor, then Bock is something like its immigration chief: roaming the border in a dune buggy, binoculars across the landscape, considering bids for entry.
SOURCE: The Guardian
