Evidence-Based Recruiting: How to Build a Company of Star Performers Through Systematic and Repeatable Hiring Practices

CHAPTER 3

How to Improve On-the-Job Success Predictions

CHANGING THE IMPOSSIBLE—HOW GOOGLE MEASURES THE UNMEASURABLE

Around the turn of the twentieth century, department store magnate John Wanamaker said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” A century later, his statement was truer than ever. William Bernbach, one of the giants of American advertising in the 1960s and 1970s, observed, “Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.” And for many years, his philosophy influenced how advertisers viewed marketing investments, or to use the more telling industry term, “marketing spend.”

At the time Google was founded, advertisers were still ...