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Google (GOOG) is moving towards extensive surveys to help weed out the more than 100,000 job applications they receive each month.

Until now Google has focused on A's on report cards and double 800s on SATs choosing not to hire engineers who had less than a 3.7 grade-point average, although salesman could get by with a 3.0 average.

They have learned, like many companies today, that academic prowess is not the most reliable way to hire good people. I know I have heard and seen so much cheating on college tests that a GPA isn't always reflective of true intelligence. Okay, so maybe because I don't have a degree at all my nose is a bit out of joint.

Well Google decided to find out if there was a way that looking at life experience or personality might help them to spot future talent. They came up with a 300-question survey that they asked of every employee who had worked for them for at least five months, with some of the following questions, according to this NYTimes.com article:

Some questions were factual: What programming languages are you familiar with? What Internet mailing lists do you subscribe to?

Some looked for behavior: Is your work space messy or neat?

And some looked at personality: Are you an extrovert or an introvert?

And some fell into no traditional category in the human resources world: What magazines do you subscribe to? What pets do you have?

Todd Carlisle, an analyst with a doctorate in organizational psychology, designed the survey and compiled the results. He had over two million data points to analyze and came up with this grain of truth: confirmation that Google's obsession with academic performance was not always correlated with success at the company. Vindicated!

Currently about 15 percent of the applicants take the survey and it will begin to be used for all applicants starting this month. It is too early to tell what difference this will make in performance, but just last week they "hired six people who had below a 3.0 GPA," according to Dr. Carlisle.

With 10,000 employees now and the possibility of doubling that figure with the tremondous growth they have exhibited, this survey experiment might be something more companies will be interested in duplicating.