Interview with Alex Lowe

‘If I had nine diamonds, and they appeared to be exactly the same size, shape and weight, but I tell you one is very slightly heavier than the other eight, and I give you a pair of balancing scales which you can use twice, how do you go about determining which is the heaviest?’

With a twinkle in his eye, Alex Lowe, industry head for classified advertising at Google, looks at me expectantly across the table in the relatively (by Google’s standards) modest meeting room on the sixth floor of the technology behemoth’s otherwise dazzling offices in London’s West End. The silence lingers…

It isn’t supposed to be like this. Mr Lowe has agreed to meet to discuss his upcoming speaking slot at June’s annual Chartered Institute of Housing conference and exhibition in Manchester. He will be discussing one of the phrases in the housing world of the past 18 months: big data.

For the salesman in Mr Lowe, the simple definition of big data is ‘the opportunity to connect your customers with their prospects’. He adds: ‘It just gives you more information about how your audience is working and helps you better understand who it is you’re trying to sell your products and services to.  That’s really what gives you a competitive advantage. You can learn more about your customers faster than your competitors - and more importantly you can do something different as a result.’

As an example of big data in action, Mr Lowe cites Google Now – a sort of virtual Google PA that helps plan your day by plotting your diary against your location. For Mr Lowe, the ‘exciting thing here is the use of a variety of data sources’, with information coming from Google, the individual themselves and advertisers. Mr Lowe is also exploring the possibilities this unlocks. For instance, offering someone a discounted meal as it is lunchtime and they are in the vicinity of a restaurant that they might like that has spare seats.

Alex will be speaking at CIH Housing on Tuesday 23 June 2015 in ‘the Big Data question – getting the best out of your data’ session at 14:15 in the main Auditorium.

Click here to book your place

But back to that diamonds question. I have made the mistake of asking the 40-year-old Mr Lowe how he arrived at Google, having previously worked as UK sales director at AutoTrader and as UK dealer marketing manager at the now defunct Rover car business.

Google has gained a reputation for its rather left-field approach to interviews, where it throws riddles and other curve ball questions at eager applicants ‘to see how they think’, says Mr Lowe.

This is what Google is all really all about: ideas. It goes out of its way to encourage and stimulate them, with everything from wacky break out areas complete with a dentist’s chair, to having too few tills in the canteen in order to ensure staff have to queue and hence begin a conversation with whoever happens to be next to them. The company deliberately pushes itself setting the bar ludicrously high – a process known as ‘10-xing’, where Mr Lowe says it sets ‘more substantial and audacious goals in order to drive innovation’. The results of this don’t always see the light of day – Mr Lowe advises housing providers to ‘get in first’ with new ideas, but to ‘fail fast’ if they flounder – but some that have resulted include the driverless Google Car and a radical new contact lens for diabetics that can measure the wearer’s blood-sugar levels and communicate with a mobile device to advise the individual of the results.

To ensure these ideas keep coming, Google aims to have an incredibly diverse workforce. It has 54,000 staff worldwide, but is growing fast – it recruited 10,000 people in 2014 alone. The company’s term for this approach is ‘Googliness’. Mr Lowe explains: ‘You’re looking for skills diversity and cultural diversity – but in a way that’s going to be uncomfortably ambitious.’

I sense there is an opportunity for Google and social landlords to work together in this area and Mr Lowe doesn’t rule it out. Any current Google job applicants will be relieved to know the company no longer asks its ‘infamous’ interview questions, having concluded that ‘it was fun but actually it didn’t make much difference to the calibre of individual that we got,’ says Mr Lowe. In case you’re wondering though, the answer to the diamond question is to split the diamonds into groups of three and weigh two groups, then split the three with the heaviest in it into single diamonds and weigh two. ‘It’s just dividing really,’ says Mr Lowe. Simple – although I didn’t get it.