How many golf balls can fit into an airplane? How many gas stations are in Manhattan?

For years, Google was known for vetting job applicants with brain-busting questions like these, even as some former employees came forward and stated that such questions had been phased out. Now, one of Google's HR execs has gone on record to explain why the company ditched the brainteasers.

"On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time," said Laszlo Bock, Google's SVP of people operations, in an interview with the New York Times. "They don't predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart."

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Instead, he says, Google is more focused on "behavioral interviews," which are less about the interviewer than the applicant. Bock says these type of interviews yield more information about how the job candidate deals with situations in the real world.

Bock also noted during the interview that Google has found grade-point averages to be a "worthless" metric for hiring. For that reason, Google has stopped asking most applicants for their transcripts and GPAs. In fact, Google is also hiring more people with no college experience whatsoever.

"The proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well," Bock said in the interview. "So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college."

Image courtesy of Dell Inc.