Why Google's hiring process is broken • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Google's hiring process is broken

#91

Post by jacques_chester » Tue, May 17, 2011, 11:26 PM UTC

totalforge wrote: post #82

yid wrote: post #16

My 2 cents: I was contacted by a recruiter, unsolicited through a referral, and asked if I was interested in interviewing. At the time, I already had an offer from one of the other big companies, which I was upfront about. The recruiter said it was ok, and would set me up for the first round of interviews. After about a week of emails, I just simply stopped hearing from the recruiter. Not a single interview, no reaso…

The recruiters are usually contractors, and they have a lot of turnover. Not that you should have gotten silence, but it's possible that's why.

That doesn't excuse them. These days we have databases. There's no reason that an entry can't be made for each applicant which is handed off to other recruiters when one leaves. That the process seems so tied to individuals is surprising to me.

Re: Why Google's hiring process is broken

#92

Post by googInterviewee » Tue, May 17, 2011, 11:26 PM UTC

(Posting anonymously because I'm in the middle of interviewing with Google)

My experience so far has been very different. I was contacted by a recruiter a few weeks ago. I had a phone interview within a week of the initial contact. Within three days, they got back to me to schedule an onsite interview.

The one negative I've encountered so far: Google has an office near where I live, but will not interview me there. This will require significant travel on my part.

Re: Why Google's hiring process is broken

#93

Post by anacrolix » Tue, May 17, 2011, 11:29 PM UTC

I got contacted out of the blue. Phone interview lined up at a very inconvenient time and everything. An hour AFTER the appointed time for the phone interview, I received an email saying they had not noticed that I hadn't graduated yet (I've had 4 years full time experience in industry and open source). I referred them to more senior colleagues who I considered to be similarly talented and had graduated, none of whom were ever contacted.

Re: Why Google's hiring process is broken

#94

Post by nostrademons » Tue, May 17, 2011, 11:30 PM UTC

noctorne wrote: post #57

joebadmo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these recruitment horror stories are starting to scare me about Google, but I wonder how much of it is selection bias. Anyone who has a good experience almost definitionally gets sucked into the G-Vortex and basically never gets heard from again, right? I have a friend who just accepted a position at Google, and she said the process was long and arduous, but it wasn't a horror story.

Well, I know Googlers pretty well. Even internally, they say their hiring process really sucks. Not one person told me this, 80% of the people I talked to told me the same thing. I personally wont blame the interviewers or the recruiters, they are doing their job. I blame their messed up Hiring Committee. I don't understand why the hiring committee can't collaborate with the interviewers and hiring manager to hire a…

That's done to eliminate bias. Remember how a couple days ago, there was a story on HN about how interviewing really sucks, because ultimately, what determines whether you get the job or not whether you happen to have a personal rapport with your interviewer? People end up caring more about how you present yourself socially than what you know.

The hiring committee is Google's answer to that. The idea is to completely divorce the hiring decision from people who have personally known the candidate. Instead, there's a very broad written information channel between interviewers, references, recruiters, and the hiring committee. But it remains written, so that all your unconscious biases about people stay out of the decision, and at least in theory, it's all based on hard data.

Re: Why Google's hiring process is broken

#95

Post by larsberg » Tue, May 17, 2011, 11:33 PM UTC

Google is considered (or at least was, by other tech companies) to have a very poor sourcing and general recruiting experience. It was assumed to be because they contract out the work.

As a contrast to that, at MSFT, we had full-time recruiting staff generally split into college and experienced recruiting (there are some extra bits not important to this). The experienced recruiting staff was assigned to divisions and worked for usually a couple of years at a time sourcing candidates specially suited to their area. The college recruiters carefully handle and ensure that only one person is in charge of each candidate, they're marshalled through all the steps, know when they'll hear what piece of info back, and are absolutely brutal with us hiring managers about making timely decisions (not that we ever drag our feet ).

While working at MSFT, I was contacted several times by different Google recruiters. Each time, I was left sort of half-indifferent e-mails or voicemails, which I was informed was the desired style of contact. I'd fire them off to my sourcing manager to forward around the recruiting org for a good laugh and jokes about where these people had been before (it's a small industry, and they often would point out ex-Cisco recruiting washouts, etc.).

That said, you can certainly go far on name alone for your recruiting, especially when your options are expected to pay out well. But it's unfortunate to have to try to build teams despite your recruiting efforts. I'd hate to have been a hiring manager there.

Re: Why Google's hiring process is broken

#96

Post by nostrademons » Tue, May 17, 2011, 11:40 PM UTC

It sounds like you were going through the software engineer interview process, when what you wanted to do is product management. This is a recruiter-fail: when someone expresses an interest in product decisions, it makes sense to send them through the PM interview process. But it's not really representative of what it's like to interview for all the different job families that one might apply to.

Re: Why Google's hiring process is broken

#97

Post by akronim » Tue, May 17, 2011, 11:41 PM UTC

ballgoogler wrote: post #68

mrgordon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google cannot find people to hire fast enough even by its own admission. I have personally never applied to work at Google but I can understand why someone who never anything heard back from a company with over 20,000 people would be a little pissed.

If they have over 20,000 employees and "they cannot find people to hire fast enough"... then perhaps they should impose even stricter hiring standards so they they don't end up with 10's of thousands of employees who are of such low value that they need to keep hiring more. Google's main problems are not in hiring more people... it is in putting the (extremely high calibre) employees that they already have to work on…

    Google's main problems are not in hiring more people

There's also some incentive for them to get good people before the competition does. It's not like they can't afford the salaries.

Re: Why Google's hiring process is broken

#98

Post by googInterviewee » Tue, May 17, 2011, 11:41 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #88

Lots of interesting stories. Disclaimer, I worked at Google for 4 years ('06 - '10) and interviewed a lot of folks (it was always a part of the job) and did a number of phone interviews too. The process then (as perhaps now) was broken and some folks within Google understood that. The process and goals were pretty simple, hire smart people that get things done. The process was aimed at finding smart people who get th…

Would you mind if I contact you with some questions? They don't relate to anything confidential, but they aren't the sort of things I can ask a recruiter.

Re: Why Google's hiring process is broken

#99

Post by munificent » Tue, May 17, 2011, 11:51 PM UTC

joebadmo wrote: post #33

yid wrote: post #16

My 2 cents: I was contacted by a recruiter, unsolicited through a referral, and asked if I was interested in interviewing. At the time, I already had an offer from one of the other big companies, which I was upfront about. The recruiter said it was ok, and would set me up for the first round of interviews. After about a week of emails, I just simply stopped hearing from the recruiter. Not a single interview, no reaso…

All of these recruitment horror stories are starting to scare me about Google, but I wonder how much of it is selection bias. Anyone who has a good experience almost definitionally gets sucked into the G-Vortex and basically never gets heard from again, right? I have a friend who just accepted a position at Google, and she said the process was long and arduous, but it wasn't a horror story.

I'm a Googler. I found the hiring process exhausting, but I felt it was thorough and fair. My recruiter did a fantastic job of walking me through the process and letting me know what was going on. I'm sure Google has made lots of mistakes hiring people, but there's always a bias towards complaint. Most people don't have the energy to type up a "everything went fine" reply.

Re: Why Google's hiring process is broken

#100

Post by citizenkeys » Tue, May 17, 2011, 11:58 PM UTC

Google's process is broken because it generally presumes job candidates know what specific job they want, and they don't. To put it in contrast, I also applied to Microsoft and they immediately assigned me a specific recruiter that I could email directly. Google needs to give job candidates a person to contact rather than expecting talent to go online and do that weird "job shopping cart" thing they have on their website.

The other reason the hiring process is broken is because it's totally backwards. The hiring process doesn't indicate any appreciation of talent. Talent in this industry consists of wanna-be rockstars. Talent wants the company to say "Hey, you're great. We want you. What's it going to take to get you here?" Google's approach, like many other companies, is "Go online, email us a resume, and we'll get back to you whenever we feel like it." Most people with talent are going to say "Forget that. You got it backwards. You need me more than I need you."

To put it in perspective, think of how professional sports teams recruit college athletes. The professional teams do every damn thing they can to get college athletes to agree to join the team. They send out recruiters that pay for meals, make the candidates feel special, and everything else to make the talent feel appreciated. That's how you recruit talent. Taking the approach of "Go online, do our rinky-dink job shopping cart thing, email us a resume, and we'll get back to you when we feel like it" doesn't attract talent and never will.