ChasNote

Jason Clement, associate director of search engine marketing at Carat Fusion, remarked in the Washington Post on Google’s historic preference for bots over humans when it comes to selling advertising: “The scariest thing about Google is they don’t know what they don’t know. There’s a difference between a Harvard mathematician and someone who’s been selling ads for 20 years. The mathematician is smarter, but if you want Coca-Cola’s dollars, the guy selling billboards for 20 years is the one you want.”

But perhaps Google execs are changing their attitude on this front. Battelle breaks the news that Google has altered its long-standing, long-controversial HR policy requiring all new recruits to show proof of a 3.0 or better GPA in college, even if a recruit went to college a long time ago (Searchblog). Wow. I guess Google realizes it needs to hire inefficient, expensive humans — even us sometimes-poor-academic-performing ad sales types! — if it wants to succeed in the brand-advertising marketplace.