While talking to some of the people at Google recently about how the company managed to score #1 in the “Fortune 500 Best Companies to Work For” for the past two years in a row, I came across a term that I had never heard before: Googly.

Several different people mentioned it during our interviews. Apparently it’s what you have to have in order to be one of the lucky few among the 761,000 applicants a year who gets hired at this enormously successful and fast moving company.

I asked Tim Anderson, one of the first one hundred employees to be hired. He’s been at Google for eight of the ten years the company has been in existence.

Tim explained that when someone is “Googly” it means that they’re very smart, very motivated, very good at working with others and very good at taking complex things and making them simple. But more important than anything, it means they’re very curious and they bring this curiosity with them to work.

The Googlers at Google are all Googly and some are even Super Googly. Now that must be something.

Gino del Guercio

Film Director