I’ve been in the workforce long enough that I remember a time when companies sometimes hired a person even though they didn’t have a specific job for them. It didn’t happen often, and it sometimes turned into a problem, but when it worked, it was kismet.

Here’s how it went, at least in my experience: I would attend a job fair of some sort where I spent a couple of days interviewing and recruiting people who were looking for a job in my industry. It was pretty rare when I found someone who was a good fit for a specific job I had open at that point in time. For the most part, I met people who were inexperienced but promising, and worth tracking for openings somewhere down the road. If you do this long enough, and attend a number of job fairs, you eventually build a pretty nice list of budding young talent that you could convert into real hires somewhere down the road.

Sometimes, however, I came across someone great, someone who would really be a top-flight hire if only I had the right job to put them in. What do you do when you find a great hire but don’t have a job open? Back in the go-go years of the late ’80s and late ’90s, sometimes you could persuade a senior manager to go out on a limb and hire them because they were just too good to pass up on. This is kind of like the thing pro football teams do during the college draft when they go for the best available athlete rather than hiring to fill a specific need. They know, as some enlightened businesses used to know, that sometimes hiring a great person helps elevate the work of everyone around them. And, there used to be a time when companies sometimes bent the budget to do this.

I found myself thinking about this today when reading that Google yesterday reported that it missed its profit target by about 10 cents per share because it hired more than it had planned to in the second quarter. “We overspent against our own plan in the area of headcount, and some of it was … because we hired a little faster than we had planned,” CEO Eric Schmidt told analysts during Thursday’s conference call (Google hired 1,548 people during the quarter, “the majority in sales, marketing and engineering positions,” according to Advertising Age, a sister publication of Workforce Management). “In looking at it we thought, was this a mistake or not? We decided it was not a mistake, that in fact, the kind of people we brought in are so good that we’re happy we did this. As I said earlier, we will continue to watch this very carefully in the future.”

It’s easy to dismiss Google’s decision to over-hire as a luxury that can be indulged when your company has a stock price over $500 and a market cap in excess of $162 billion. That’s certainly one way to look at it. Of course, you can also view this—as I do—as just par for the course with Google, another one of the smart business and workforce decisions that helped to build a mega company with a mega stock price and gigantic market cap. Yes, the rich get richer, but sometimes, they get richer because they are smarter. So it goes with Google.