I found this opinion piece of Walter Chen's at LinkedIn, intriguing:
"Google has long had a reputation for being a place that's near
impossible to get a job if you aren't a Stanford or MIT grad. They not
only asked you for your college GPA, they even asked you what you made
on your SAT as a pimple-faced high schooler.
...Their use of data is so powerful that it was able to refute the bias
of the company's founders towards those with an elite educational
background that mirrored theirs --- that is, top university grads with
high GPAs --- andit actually resulted in changed organizational behavior.
For years, candidates were screened according to SAT scores and college
grade-point averages, metrics favored by its founders.But numbers and
grades alone did not prove to spell success at Google and are no longer
used as important hiring criteria,says Prasad Setty
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/technology/big-data-trying-to-build-better-workers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&;>,
vice president for people analytics.
Rather, based on extensive surveys of its work force and performance
data, Google discovered that*its most innovative workers
<http://blog.idonethis.com/google-most-important-leadership-trait/>"are
those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also
feel that they have much personal autonomy."*
Google's findings have a strong congruence with bestselling authorDan
Pink's <http://blog.idonethis.com/ourinterviewofdanpink/>work, that*the
source of human motivation and our best work comes from the drive
towardsautonomy
<http://blog.idonethis.com/60-percent-rule-management-autonomy-work/>,
mastery and purpose*. This can clash with high-prestige and credentialed
individuals who are driven by external recognition and rewards, not
curiosity and craft.
What you might end up with is people who can follow the rules, but not
necessarily those who are after moonshot innovation with extreme
dispatch and verve."
/endquote
(I expect you may have seen the movie ~ The Internship (2013) - a
fictional account of a Summer internship offer from Google, taken up by
two older out-of-work salespeople - which implements this viewpoint...)