There’s one thing for certain you can say about Google: The company has been built on making decisions that seem to leave everyone else scratching their heads.

Over the years, the search engine giant has always seemed to disregard conventional business wisdom and go its own way, especially when it came to the care and handling of its workforce. Whether it was lavishing employees with over-the-top benefits that you couldn’t get anywhere else or using its technological know-how to identify which of its workers were most likely to quit, Google always seemed to revel in both being people-oriented and doing it differently.

That’s why this nugget of Google information from The New York Times’ Bits blog jumped out at me this morning.

“Google … holds a prime vantage point from which to observe economic trends,” the Times’ Steve Lohr wrote. “And Google, though perhaps not a stand-in for the economy as a whole, is starting to see a recovery. The company recently began hiring again and is looking for companies to buy—both activities that had been held in check for the last year.”

In other words, Google feels so confident about the pace of America’s economic recovery that the company is putting its money on the table and taking a roll of the dice.

However, from Google’s perspective, this is hardly a risky gamble.

“The worst [of the recession] is behind us, and we’re seeing aspects of recovery,” CEO Eric Schmidt told a group of reporters Wednesday, October 7, at the company’s offices in downtown Manhattan. “We’re increasing our investment and hiring rate in anticipation of a recovery.”

But this makes me wonder: What is it that Google knows that the rest of us don’t? Why is it that the company feels so positive when most everyone else is highly pessimistic and taking a wait-and-see approach?

“I would hope we’re a leading indicator,” Schmidt said, and I think most everyone who understands that you really need hiring and job growth to truly get the economy going again would agree. Of course, this isn’t the first time Google has done what I would call anticipatory hiring, and that sort of thinking is, well, what makes Google so different from just about any other company anywhere.

But is it the sign we seek, the one that signals that the recovery is here? Who knows, really. I hope that Google’s actions are the start of something big, but one company starting to hire again does not mean the recovery is nigh.

Still, I like Google’s track record on stuff like this. Here’s hoping that Eric Schmidt and his gang in Silicon Valley are as skilful as economic prognosticators as they are in building a killer Web-search business.

If they are, I think they have a future in Washington, perhaps helping a guy named Ben Bernanke at a place called the Federal Reserve.

Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.