Why Google's hiring process is broken

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 reason for terminating contact, just plain dead silence. I tried emailing her a few times and left her a voicemail, noting very politely that they had contacted me and not vice versa, and asking if they were still interested in setting up an interview, but all I got was stony silence. If that's not broken, I don't know what is. For a company that hires the best engineering talent, they either hire substandard HR people, or perhaps most HR people just operate at a different level of efficacy.

I haven't had an interview in over 6 years, but I have been approached by multiple recruiters in the same time span.<p>I actually dread the day I choose to switch jobs and have to face another technical interview - considering that my knowledge of college-level CS has declined over time. It's not because I am less skilled now than I was before, it's because you don't have to constantly create fantastically fast algorithms on a daily basis (at least in my job!).<p>The skills that I have developed over the past 6 years - designing complex components that interact with other complex components in a hugely complex product, making improvements in the design of a 20 year old codebase, deciding between fixing a bug and compatibility etc., intuition about design choices and how they fit in the product, and yes, debugging (!) - none of these are covered in technical interviews these days.<p>Sure, I could explain how a b-tree works - but that's not going to help me resolve my next bug.

I disagree with article's conclusion that they are selecting for "backend" engineers. They are selecting for people that think over-engineering every little data structure is the way to build good programs. The skill software companies need is the ability to get a hundred subsystems tested and working together, which is totally different.<p>I know someone who recently interviewed with Google and he told me about the algorithms question he "got wrong." After he came up with a simple solution to a simple problem, the interviewer told him the better, googley-er algorithm, which was: a) far more complex and difficult to implement, b) had far more corner cases that would need unit tests, c) had more overhead in the expected case, but d) technically had a better big-O in the (extreme) worst case.<p>In other words, the interview was screening for people who have been to school but haven't ever built anything.

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.<p>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 &#60;grin&#62;).<p>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.).<p>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 <i>despite</i> your recruiting efforts. I'd hate to have been a hiring manager there.

Every few weeks or so I'm contacted by the same Google recruiter asking if I'm interested in an engineering opportunity.<p>After a while, I responded by asking who had referred me. He answered: "Referrals are confidential, but this person knows you from your days at &#60;proceeds to list out my LinkedIn&#62;."<p>Awful. Plus I'm a shitty programmer.

I had a similar experience. Same letter from the recruiter, back-and-forth with rate-your-skills, but then nothing. It's strange because the position they had in mind seemed directly aligned with my proven interests and abilities. Hell, my cover letter was pretty much describing the job they wanted before they even told me about it.<p>I really see it as strange that I never got a call back. (Maybe it's not over yet, it's only been a few weeks.)

My own personal "horror" story.<p>Google reached out to me, unsolicited, for a web developer position. I wasn't looking, but I thought cool, I'll at least talk to them. The recruiter kept asking me about how good my Java was. I repeated what it said on my resume, that I only used it in college, but that my OO skills were strong and transferable. Afterwards the recruiter emailed me, and said I wasn't a good fit because I didn't have enough Java experience. I didn't even get a technical phone screen.<p>Java experience is serious business.

I actually ended up turning down a google offer for this precise reason -- the questions are biased in favor of a `theory` person over a `practice` person.<p>Having been through a real interview (where the interviewer went through my resume before the interview and prepared real thoughtful questions that would only be known if you actually worked on the language), I took that offer and now interview others more intelligently.

My Google offer experience: I turned down a offer from Google last spring. Long story, but my reasons can be summed up as having a more challenging opportunity in a leadership position at a small company versus having to enter the "engineer" lotto where you don't know what team and project you get placed on.<p>Funny thing is, I had a call from one of their recruiters today. A couple times previously somebody contacted me by email and I said "sure, call me", and didn't hear from them. But this guy was out of the blue and from a different office and had a different approach to it.<p>The message was that things are different at Google and they at least from his office's perspective, they treat each recruitment uniquely.<p>My take away is that Google is a big company and you'll get different experiences depending on how you enter the HR process (college grad applicant, versus sought after name). The OP in this case is doing a lot of generalization.

<i>Asked me to rate my skills in a list of 14 programming languages.</i><p>Really? I'd love to know what they did with that data. It seems almost completely useless except to say "Tim does not know any Javascript, indicated by his zero score on that."

It doesn't take a designer or user experience expert to note that google products lack consistency and don't interopt with each other very well. I think this stems from larger issues that are much harder to fix, or through 20% projects and acquisitions that were developed independently of a common set of standards. I doubt they are ignoring it.<p>Perhaps the lack of a "Google standard" enables eager developers to create amazing new products, like Gmail.

This "Google can't do design" meme is really getting old, imho. At best, this is a story about one recruiter in a giant company not doing his job well in matching the requirements with the skill set of the candidate.<p>It is easy to conclude preconceived notions.

Sometimes I feel like the only person who was not hired by Google that didn't become bitter. I was treated with respect, was put up in a nice hotel, met very smart people, answered (and didn't ;) very tough questions. In the end it didn't work out. I had a blast nonetheless.

Google manages not to hire someone who didn't want to work there in the first place. Sounds like the process is working just fine to me.<p>In all seriousness, there may be some issues with their hiring process, but I think the Google hiring practices would best be analyzed by using the aggregated data, rather than the trickle of anecdotes we tend to hear about in public. Even if Google got their hiring right 99.9 percent of the time, there would be hundreds of people, if not thousands, who were perfect for the job, and still didn't get hired.

I recently talked to a colleague who was hired as a developer by Google.<p>He went through 3 rounds of "hiring committees".<p>3 different committees to make a developer hire is obviously broken. The ability to evaluate culture and skill fit should be possible with a hiring manager and a few prospective peers.

Lots of interesting stories.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The process was aimed at finding smart people who get things done. That, like the phrase "largest integer" is easy to say and rolls off the lips but when you need to actually write out what it means gets a bit squirrely.<p>The first challenge is what does "get things done" mean? Well for college students it means you got your diploma and at the same time you contributed to some FOSS project. For people with 0 - 5 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding. For people with 5 - 15 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding. For people with 15 to 25 years experience it means you shipped a product where you did most of the coding.<p>Did you see what I did there? Google wanted smart people but the definition of smart was "you write a lot of code" and "get things done" was "that code shipped in the product/project." Fundamentally they didn't have any way to judge or evaluate the 'goodness' of what someone did if it wasn't writing code. Designers don't write a lot of code and they don't generally have a good metric for what constitutes good which can be empirically tested. The process has a hard time accomodating that. And if you're "good" at spotting problems in a process or getting folks organized around some better way of doing things? That's not measurable either.<p>There was a company, BASF, a chemical company which had an advertising campaign around the fact that they were part of the process and materials that made quality products, their tag line was "We don't make the products you buy, we make them better." [1] And I noted that Google was exceptionally bad at hiring "BASF" people, which is to say people who bring the quality of other work up, or products up, or processes up.<p>The people who did those roles in Google all started out as coders and that is how they got hired. It was only after they were working there that they (and Google) discovered they had this leveraging effect.<p>In order to keep bias out of the process, Google isolates the steps where bias can creep in; separated the folks who decided hire / no-hire from the folks who decided on compensation; the folks who decide to hire and the folks who decide which project they work for. For all my time there, you could not interview for a specific job, you interviewed to get 'in' and then your name showed up on a list and the allocation process would determine which project got you.<p>Often a candidate would ask during the interview "What would I be working on?" the only truthful answer was "That is impossible to say."<p>Before you even get to that point though you get into "the system." Since Google keeps a record of everyone they have interviewed or has shown up as a lead and not interviewed. There is a long, long list of people (I once joked that it was everyone in the market). If you are an employee and you might know that person, common employer, common university, etc. The system could automatically send you an email asking for your opinion on the candidate.<p>This isn't really any different than any other company, person X shows up in the candidate list, people who work at the company who worked at person X's company are asked if they knew this person when they were there. But it can have unintended consequences.<p>Lets say there is a person X, who gets hired, from company Y, and person X really didn't fit in at Y and felt really abused by the company. Now new candidates from Y generate an email to X with the standard "You worked at Y when candidate Z did etc etc." Now person X is still pissed off about how Y treated them and so they respond to all of those emails with "Yeah, candidate Z was a crappy engineer, everyone had to carry for them they never did anything useful." Maybe someone else from Y says "candidate Z was great, everyone turned to them for advice." The process of separating the interviewers from the decisions means that this feedback bubbles up all equally weighted. Hard to know that employee X has said the same thing about every candidate that has come from Y, and if the committee sees two comments one positive and one negative and there isn't anyone on the committee who knows any different then how do you evaluate?<p>The simplest solution if either has an equal probability of being the 'correct' assesment is that you pass on them <i>because you can't know if you have bad data.</i> And that was a part of the process that was fundamentally broken.<p>Because Google gets a metric crap load of resumes and candidates all the time, passing on someone who is +1/-1 like that makes sense because you can't know which of the two feedback comments more accurately reflects the real candidate behavior. The result is that hiring someone with a grudge can poision the feedback pool for a bunch of possible hires. If you weren't Google and didn't have this huge backlog of candidates, you might dig deeper to find out which one was the more accurate representation, but if you are Google you just move on. Externally that sometimes appears that you just stop answering the phone.<p>It also means that you miss out on quality people who would be good for the company and ultimately Google will have to find a way to address that issue (if they haven't already) because they are running out of people to interview.<p>As with most things Google, you combine a data-driven, automata friendly process with fuzzy data and alternate agenda actors, at the scale Google runs at, and you get lots of weird artifacts.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ksUNyhQjLE" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ksUNyhQjLE</a>

It does seem like Google is more focused on the programing side of things and design is an afterthought for them. Which is a pity because I feel overall look and design dramatically changes my perceptions of how good something is.<p>Another beef I have with Google is the sorta half-assedness of some of their products. They seem to release things early to get them out there, which isn't necessary a bad thing but now I've started to realize this it's soured me to using some of their api's and products

I've also had a bad recruiting experience with Google, but for very different reasons. Personally, from what I can see (i.e. outside looking in), I think they have major systemic problems in how they do recruiting.

(Posting anonymously because I'm in the middle of interviewing with Google)<p>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.<p>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.

I couldn't agree more with this one. I have trouble talking to people about this because I failed their interview so I come across as bitter (which I am). But this problem is not just Google's problem. It's systemic. Someone a long time ago decided to turn interviewing into a formula - a bad one - and it stuck. Drives me crazy.

I need no evidence beyond the fact they didn't hire me when they had the opportunity ;-)

What position was the author interviewing for? Google (and most big companies) seem to pigeonhole candidates into a certain slot, even when it is obvious they'd be better off in a different title.<p>The real way in which their process seems broken is the wildly different experiences people have seemingly at random, depending on who their arbitrarily assigned recruiter is. When I interviewed I had none of this weird "rate yourself" questions, and a mostly positive experience. But it seems like if I had randomly been assigned a different recruiter, or someone tried to fit me into a different bucket, I would have had a wildly different experience. How can you compare candidates evenly when their experiences seem so randomly different?

Google probably expects that all designers/product management folks that they are interviewing to be good at programming too. There are good programmers, good designers and some people who are really good at both. Since a lot of people want to work at Google, they are using that to their advantage and hiring good designers who are also good programmers.

I've interviewed for a summer internship at Google twice: this summer and last. The first time I interviewed with them, they emailed me the same day to tell me that my interview went really well and they'd like to proceed to host matching. Unsure of the way the process worked, I emailed the recruiter a week later to ask what the next steps were. She called me back half an hour later to ask if I had any deadlines, which I didn't. The reason for the delay, she said, was that Google tried to first match returning interns with hosts before new interns. A couple weeks later, I had a phone interview with a host, it went well, and I was assigned to work with him over the summer. That was that.<p>This summer, I decided I wanted to return to work at Google again, but I had a specific project in mind I wanted to work on. I filled out a form stating my project interests (which were very specific this time around), but no recruiter reached out to me. I talked to one of my colleagues at Google from the previous summer, he talked to HR or something, and I got a new recruiter. Then I went through five host interviews in three days, picked my favorite, and that was that.<p>So in my experience, the hiring process at Google isn't that bad. It's just that if you have a delay that's too long, you need to follow up.

I think an underlying reason for so many anecdotes of the sort in the comment threads here is the sheer number of hires the Goog is trying to make right now -- according to <a href="http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html" rel="nofollow">http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html</a>, they've grown headcount by close to 10% in Q1 alone so far.<p>Life for their recruitment folks is probably fairly interesting these days.

The OP is doing a lot of generalization and extrapolation to make the judgement contained in the title, considering he doesn't even seem to have made it through stage one of the process he's attempting to judge. I'm pretty sure there's some folks who get rejected at the preliminary screening stage of my company's hiring process (some, I'm sure, for the wrong reasons) but I hardly think that would justify condemning our entire recruiting strategy and process.<p>This seems mostly like a standard recipe for baiting traffic from HN to a blog: make up a sweeping generalization about a company people are deeply interested in (e.g. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter) based on a very limited data set, put that in your headline, then have your article talk about how much better your company is at XYZ by comparison. It's the HN version of the humblebrag tweet.

I'd like to work at Google, but I have no interest in going through the embarrassment of their [seeminly] stuck up interview process. No doubt this is my loss, and not Google's.

I had a relatively good interview experience with Google. I wasn't hired but I felt that the process was fair. True, it was long and I had to invest some significant time to freshen up my algorithm skills. But overall I was left with a good impression.<p>I do think that Google puts too much accent on algorithms and college-level CS. I consider myself a good programmer. I created two moderately successful Micro ISVs in my free time. I contributed a huge chunk to the product at my corporate job. I get things done. However I felt that this is not what Google looks for even if the say they do.

"User are not As and Bs."<p>Reminds me of working at MS as a designer. It's challenging for an engineering-focused company to suddenly try to integrate design into their products--especially one so focused on metrics. This often leads to "duct-tape design" instead of a clear unified design. User testing no longer validates design, but completely drives it. E.g., because our study found that users clicked more buttons when they are bright red and blinking in their faces, let's make all buttons blink red! Brilliant? No.

I haven't interviewed at Google, but I've interviewed at a few other companies that seem to follow a similar style.<p>I'd agree that the hiring process may be broken, but that these companies don't completely realize it. I have no problem with the intensely rigorous emphasis on CS (and math, sometimes), but I've been on these interviews and realized that (after seven hours of interviewing) we still haven't discussed what the company actually <i>does</i>.<p>Here's the thing - when you're interviewing a very experienced candidate, the candidate may know more than you do about how to write the software. They may know things you haven't even thought to ask about. This isn't a reason to skip the technical grilling, that's a critical background. My problem is that these companies heap it on and on and on, and then they make an offer based on compensation for someone who can survive a technical grilling.<p>What if this candidate has experience writing software in your domain? What if the candidate has a deep understanding of the business space and knows a lot about what those customers are looking for? What it there's a completely different approach that you haven't even considered?<p>A candidate like that is, quite frankly, probably worth much more than someone with a strong theory background but no real domain knowledge (though I would still hire that guy). So I suspect that these interviews are good at establishing a high bar, but aren't so good at identifying certain types of developers who could be absolute game changers for the company.<p>Ironically, the only time a company did do this for me, I didn't get the offer ;) It was at netflix, and (after the obligatory data structures grilling), they talked to me about all their data mining needs. I told them I didn't have much of a data mining background, but discussed how they might approach these problems a completely different way.<p>A few days later: thanks but no thanks, they wanted a data miner. Oh well ;) Still, it was one of the best interviews I've been on, actually <i>fun</i> and energetic. And I felt that if they'd made me an offer, they'd know <i>why</i>.<p>This is what may be missing from a lot of these interview processes, which is why they may be "broken" in the sense that they don't really get at why you'd want to hire a specific person, beyond the fact that he cleared a high technical bar.

Hahaha, today morning I was thinking about why startups manage to leech millions of $$s selling services that Google actually offers for free.<p>And I reached the same conclusion - Google doesn't focus on users and thus completely misses the mark. They focus on engineers but not designers or market researchers.<p>This is why, I think, App Engine will be a huge success and why Wave failed. It was an excellent product, IMO, but it wasn't built with a particular user in mind.

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.

They asked me how to rm a file named -f. Seriously. I thought to myself what a silly question. That's like 20 year old Unix trivia. I was dumb-founded. This was the second phone interview. I knew then I did not want to work for them and I told the recruiter I was not interested. They called me and they initiated the contact.

Easier to get bought than hired?

<i>Design decisions powered by A/B testing are a great way of incrementally improving your product, but trying to use them to drive the overall product direction can lead you to decisions that fly in the face of common sense.</i><p>Good lord do I agree. At a certain level, you just have to trust your gut.

I submitted my resume to Google and filled out their top X language survey, but never even so much got back an email from them after waiting for over a month.<p>Oh well, there's plenty of other companies who were happy to talk to me.

This reminds me of the saying: To a man with a Hammer, everything looks like a nail.<p>Google's Hammer is its (admittedly great) expertise at Algorithmically solving Hard Webscale Data Problems. Unfortunately some problems cannot be solved by the Hammer of Algorithms - Social Products is one of them and Great UI is another. Think about any Google Product (Search, Maps, Youtube, Groups,..) that is the very best in either of these two areas.

I was contacted by a recruiter for a security test engineer after some crazy stuff I did which got out into the international press. I meet up all their requirments besides strong coding in c++, java, python. My main is PHP, JS and python at the level of exploit development. I have a lot and strong experiences described in the CV. No response from the recruiter yet ...

Another interesting view on why Google's hiring process will bring it down sooner or later - <a href="http://geekrage.tumblr.com/post/5237818153/why-google-or-everyone-else-will-eventually-fail" rel="nofollow">http://geekrage.tumblr.com/post/5237818153/why-google-or-eve...</a>

Call me old fashioned but I think Google keeps having slightly embarrassing failures because it tries to copy ideas, without significantly improving on them, where the dominant player has already gained a critical mass of users.

Related question, how easy/hard is it to move around internally once you are "in"?

If you google "google job interview", my nightmare story is #2 or #3 - read shmula.<p>I eventually received a job offer, but by that point, I wasn't interested.<p>Anyways, the details of my story are in that blog post.

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.<p>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."<p>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.

In a nutshell: Google has developed a reputation for interviewing skill sets, as opposed to interviewing people. Sadly, that's common practice industry-wide.

They are self-selecting for a certain type of person and that will likely hurt them in the long-run (may even be hurting them in the short-run).