January 3, 2007

Turning Scattered Email and Faxes into a Database or More - Learning from Google's New Hiring Process

Google recently put together a massive questionnaire to help it better find new employees for its massive growth amongst the 100,000 applications it receives each month. In the past it found the right employees by looking for high degrees of academic qualifications and brains. However, as Google grows it realizes that it will have to find good people who are not necessarily brain-iacs.

(Photo of Laszlo Bock (left) Google's vice president for people operations and an analyst)

It's solution, reports the NYT, was to find out more about its CURRENT employees and put together a questionnaire to find candidates who it thought could best match the world of Google.

What's in this for you to learn?

If you're like a typical small business you rely on incoming email or faxes to manage a wide range of business processes. However, one thing you might want to consider is determining what inbound information can be first put into a database and NOT coming in via email or fax.

Of course many of you input sales orders directly into a database, but what about resumes? What about customer suggestions? Step back and think about all the email and faxes you receive and think about which ones can be directly input into an online database.

The advantages of an online database are that you can quickly sort through the information, query it and turn it into useful data based on your particular needs.

Microsoft Access and File Maker Pro make two software based databases.

Intuit's Quickbase, eUnifydb and HyperOffice are great places to start for databases served as a hosted application.

Read the NYT article here.

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