Google’s free meal passes for employees is not a perk, says CEO Sundar Pichai; it is …

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently appeared on ‘The David Rubenstein Show: Peer to Peer Conversations’ where he revealed free meal passes for employees is more than just a perk. Financier and philanthropist David Rubenstein in the interview asked Pichai “Every day, you must have calculation that says, are we spending this much on food? We’re getting this much, higher productivity, and how do you assess that?”.To the question, Pichai replies saying that free meals for all ‘sparks creativity’ and ‘creates community’.
Explaining how many innovative ideas were born from casual conversations in the company’s cafés, he said that “the benefit that comes out of that dwarfs the costs associated with it.”
“I can recall several times, when I was working at Google early on, being in cafes, meeting someone else, talking and getting excited about something. So it sparks creativity.”

Criteria for entry-level job hires at Google

During the interview, Pichai also revealed that nearly 90% of candidates offered positions at Google choose to accept them. “The metric I look at is when we make an offer what percentage of people accept the offer and, you know, it is almost close to 90%,” he said.
When asked about what Google looks for a candidate applying for an entry-level role, Pichai told that it depends on a case-to-case basis. “If you’re in engineering, we are looking for really good programmers, people who understand computer science well and you know, can be dynamically willing to learn and grow, apply themselves into new situations and do well,” he explained.
“But we are really looking for ‘superstar software engineers,” he further adds