Photo: Robert Daly

Google is well known for its confounding interview questions: How would you explain a database to your 8-year-old nephew? How many golf balls can fit in a school bus? Why are manholes round? What if — and, fine, it’s not exactly the likeliest scenario but what if — you were somehow shrunk to the size of a nickel and then tossed into a blender and had only 60 seconds to escape?

If it seems a tad nebulous to you what, exactly, these questions could possibly tell a hiring manager about a prospective employee’s potential, well, it seems Google’s Laszlo Bock would agree. In an interview this week on NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast, Bock — whose official title is senior vice president of people operations; he’s the head of human resources, essentially — told host Shankar Vedantam that the company’s days of brainteasers like these are behind them. But the HR reps still have a few tricky questions up their sleeves.

Here’s one of their new ones: “On a scale of one to five, rate yourself as a software engineer.” Seems relatively straightforward, right? Ah, and this is why you’ll never make it at Google. Bock’s team has identified some intriguing correlations in a job candidate’s answer and their eventual success at the company — but, crucially, there is a gender difference here. For a guy, the “correct” answer — that is, the “most predictive of success,” as Bock phrases it — is four. “And our hypothesis is, that’s because men tend to overestimate their capabilities, on average, [and] men tend to be less self-aware, on average, as [compared to] women,” Bock said. “And for a man to say four was a signal — not the only one, but a signal — that this guy’s a little more self-aware, maybe he realizes he has something to learn, and that was positively correlated with success here.”

So — a little humility is a desirable quality for the men who wish to work at Google. Good to know. But it was a slightly different story for the women applying to the tech giant. Let’s let Bock explain: