Google Adjusts Hiring Processes 355
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Google is attempting to fine tune its hiring process as it ramps up recruiting to keep pace with its success, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'In Google's early years, [Sergey] Brin or co-founder Larry Page interviewed nearly all job candidates before they were officially hired. A former Google executive recounts how, on occasion, Mr. Brin would show up for candidates' job interviews in unconventional dress, from roller blades to a cow costume complete with rubber udders around Halloween. Even today, at least one of the co-founders reviews every job offer recommended by an internal hiring committee on a weekly basis, sometimes pushing back with questions about an individual's qualifications.' While the interview process can remain 'glacial,' Google's new head of human resources notes that the average number of in-person interviews for each candidate offered a job has declined to 5.1 from 6.2. The company continues to seek overqualified employees who can be promoted quickly."
They hold nothing on Adm. Rickover (Score:5, Interesting)
Innnnteresting... (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in HR for a while, and the boss there - someone I regard highly - had a saying: "Problems aren't encountered, they're recruited". By that token, the converse is also true. If you actively seek people who expect to do better things (not just want to), they probably will, and so will your company.
Word to the wise.
Yup, it's TOUGH. (Score:5, Interesting)
The results? Zero persons hired. And we are all card-carrying, Linux-using, OpenBSD-loving, certified nerds. Heck, just check my Journal if you don't believe me (Last entry: "How to compile gcc-4.1.1 on Solaris 8").
(All the names have been changed to protect the guilty, of course)
The moral of the story: it's tough kids. It's even worse than that. It's double-extra tough, with a heaping plate of steaming geekiness on the side. Is it worth it? Hey, don't ask me, I don't know. What I know is that we all now have great jobs, that are well paid, and did not take all this insanity to get. But these jobs are not 'cool' Google jobs, of course. YMMV.
Ask me again in a couple of years, when I try to get another job at the Googleplex...
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Interesting)
They're doing worse than discriminating against those without wealthy parents that can afford the expensive out of state top schools. They're interviewing people with degrees from lesser schools with no intent on hiring them. My undergrad degree is in electrical engineering and my masters is in computer engineering both from Clemson. At the time, Clemson was less than $500/semester which was all I could possibly afford. When I interviewed with Google I got the impression that they had zero intent on hiring me no matter what happened. I was asked several times why I didn't go to a "better" school. For the job they contacted me about I wrote the top textbook on the subject, currently used at Stanford, Univ of Colorado, and GA Tech among others, so I thought I would have been treated more respectfully. They called me. I wasted over $3k in expenses out of pocket to interview with them. And no I didn't get to meet Larry Page.
Officially they said I didn't have the experience they needed. That's a load of crap. I did distributed systems over the Internet for over a decade before Google was even started. I founded the first commercial ISP in this state. I was CTO of three Internet start-ups between 1994 and 2003. All three are still in business. They're not doing great and I didn't make much money but they have survived which is more than you can say about most Internet start-ups.
They hired someone that wasn't qualified and has no experience but had a degree from Stanford. After that bad experience I sold all of my Google stock. I don't think a company can survive long-term making those type of brain-dead decisions. Thank you Google for wasting my time.
Re:Yup, it's TOUGH. (Score:5, Interesting)
My experience was the exact opposite. Google saw my blog, phoned me, and asked if I'd be interested in working for them. They did two phone interviews which were utterly trivial, just chatting about programming. They flew me out to California, and the five in-person interview were almost equally trivial. One of them was "forget this, want to get lunch?". The result was unanimous in my favour, and I was hired with six figures a week later. I got the impression that they had already made up their minds, and were just going through the motions of the interview.
The process really unnerved me. I'm a good programmer, but frankly I'm not THAT good. Heck, I don't even have a university degree.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want someone who can take directions, work in adverse conditions, do with little pay, and improvise with what's available, hire someone from the military.
You get what you pay ofr, more often than not. An expensive school is basically a training pedigree; I'm not going to hire someone for a job paying (say) $80k a year from a "better than average" school or even no school at all, without the CV speaking volumes, over someone with a CV speaking volumes or the big-school diploma for $150. That $80k is a much bigger gamble.
Re:They hold nothing on Adm. Rickover (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhh.. How about the Cold War? His accomplishments are difficult to argue with; the guy pretty much by himself twisted the Navy's arm into building a nuclear submarine, and got it done in 1954. He started the project in 1949. And just for historical perspective, the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945.
This man created the nuclear power industry, and then ran it with brutal efficiency. He made a lot of enemies in the process. And while his methods may have been unconventional, its hard to argue with the results.
Well, they certainly need to change something... (Score:5, Interesting)
The story is as below:
1) So I get the 'thank you for your interest we really want to talk to you blah blah' email from one of the people in HR, requesting a phone interview from the US to my mobile (note: I live in AU), so I give them my full, prefixed international mobile number: +614XXXXXXXX, and we arrange a time. I was to be interviewed by their head honcho of Open Source Chris DiBona.
So, I wait patiently for a call a few days later, the phone never rings.
Turns our they couldn't get the number right, or at least, didn't know how to call an Australian international mobile number.
They said they left messages on my phone, but I don't have voicemail on, the mobile phone isn't an answering machine, and it's on and in full coverage all the time...
I only find this out later that day when I emailed them requesting what happened...
2) So, we re-organised the interview (over email with their HR people), again with Chris DiBona.
There's a mess up again, and nobody calls. Again, I waited patiently with the phone, awaiting for the call, nothing happened.
3) So, we reschedule the interview AGAIN (this time, not with Chris, but another person high up the chain who will remain unnamed). They forget to call.
4) So, it's a week and a bit later, as due to the time difference, the turn-around on sorting out these stuffups takes about 2.5 days each time.
I re-schedule again, but I don't pause my life for it anymore (decided to go to work anyway). Guess what, he forgets to call, and the HR girl who tries to contact me, forgot to press the '+' in '+61' to call my international phone number, so she couldn't get to me.
5) It's almost two weeks later now, and we re-schedule again, with a lady. I finally get a call in the morning.
40 minutes of questions on B+ trees and Index tables, and I'm done.
6) I get an email a week after that saying 'thank you for your interest blah blah, but you don't fit the profile for' - This being for a different job to that of what I actually applied for.
So, understandably, by the end of this all, I really didn't give a shit if I didn't get the job, well, at least the job I applied for.
My skill set is great, my academic record 'alright', but to be honest, if a company can't pull its shit together like that, then I'm really not that interested in working for them, regardless of the inherit 'coolness' factor.
In any case, I'm doing better now that I envisage I would be if I were simply a Software Engineer at Google in any case, but that's how things in life pan out don't they
If your interviewer is a psycho nut!! (Score:3, Interesting)
if they can hack it.
NOTE to google, if you have to go through 8 phone interviews, 5 personal interviews, then either your so bi-polar and anal, or so innefficient, that you
daily work practice is just as slow you never get anything done - 12 meetings to decide one icon perhaps?. Work fast, work elite, like 80s hackers did. Document later
or get a cheap secretary to dictate the docs.
2. I bet the google guys would fail lots of interviews themselves, thats why they probably started google in the first place, because they knew it was tuff out there.
3. It doesnt take much to be great, you just have to know whats crap, thats all, there are lots of ways to achieve great results, there are many paths
to the final goal, but if you dont know the traps, then your toast. Taking a long time for interviews is bad business, the other person isnt loaded with 100000s of dollars
saved up, he has to eat, and pay bills, he wont wait 6 weeks, he'll take the first decent job. If someone you see is good, grab them asap.
4. Like any artist of photographer or musician, you only have to know their past work, and bingo you know if they are good. Past results speak.
5. lots of things google does isnt WOW man stuff, it just takes hours to do.
So no one over 40 with real experience then (Score:4, Interesting)
Good job Google. Good to know that we greybeards are at least as disposable to you as your Indian help desk.
And if you are from Google please ignore this posting as I have nothing to offer someone as young and brash as you are.
Re:Yup, it's TOUGH. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They hold nothing on Adm. Rickover (Score:5, Interesting)
But if you want to hear "whacky".... he drank a glass of primary coolant in front of Congress to make a point about nuclear power not being as dangerous as the uninformed might think.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:5, Interesting)
In my case, the first interview was great. It was with the guy who wrote the Borland C++ Compiler, and it lasted about an hour and a half on the phone. At the end, he seemed happy, I was happy, and he even said he hoped to be able to meet me when I got there.
The second interview was with a guy on the billing team. It was strange - he kept trying to twist the answers ("Well, what happens if your database doesn't support joins?"). It was also fairly short - the questions I asked him at the end was almost longer than the intereview.
I got a call back about 4 days later saying they didn't like the way I "think". Which turns out was better than the reaction my coworker got in his 3rd interview when the guy, who was asking him to discuss proofs, asked if he was "dense".
No matter, both of us are now working for a competitor about 15 hours north and I couldn't be happier.
Google needs to grow up (Score:5, Interesting)
When I visited Google in August, I spent the entire day inside a 10'x10' room answering questions. When I asked questions of my interviewers, the response was always either "I don't know anything about that, you should ask someone else", or "I'd love to talk about that, but I've got a time limit and lots of questions I need you to answer". I don't blame my interviewers for this; they did the best they could. I blame HR for setting up the process the way they did. In the end, Google was absolutely certain that they wanted to hire me, but they hadn't done anything to convince me that I wanted the job they were offering. None of my interviewers took me to their corner of the building and showed me what it was like to work at Google; none of my interviewers talked about the interesting problems they had worked on recently; in fact, none of them told me even remotely as much about Google as I had learned in 15 minutes of looking at the Google jobs website.
Was the hiring process unusually bungled in my case? Probably -- Google HR had trouble figuring out what I do (which is a separate issue for Google to fix. Note to recruiters: If you can't understand something on someone's CV, ask someone with a technical background to explain it to you. The question "do you have a Master's degree?" should never be asked of someone who has a doctorate). But even if they had decided what job I was being considered for before starting to interview me, I doubt it would have made any difference.
If you want to hire good people, be prepared to spend at least as much time showing them why they should accept your offer as you do deciding if you want to make them an offer. "We're cool" may be enough to convince some people; but the smarter people are, the less likely they are to drink Kool-Aid.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:4, Interesting)
No, you don't. In Australia the last decade or so, there has been a HUGE backlash against private (high) schools and universities. Why? Because to protect their reputation, and be able to justify raising their fees, they spoonfeed the kids.
Did you know that after first semester in Australian universities, nearly /eighty/ per cent of dropouts are from private schools, when the kids find out that they're expected to study and research for themselves, and that study and research required as a result of lectures does not mean "go to TA / tutor and ask him the answers to the questions".
Likewise, some of the private universities are risking their reputation by becoming in danger of being degree factories. Several investigations show that "international" and "full fee paying" students have passed and been graduated with lower results than other students who have been failed.
Re:Yup, it's TOUGH. (Score:5, Interesting)
By the end of the second I was in two minds whether to take things any further anyway. I wanted to work for Google, but could I go through fourteen interviews? I was concerned about the money, as no number was on the job spec and big names often offer low and offer options to compensate. I can't pay my mortgage with stock options!
And, most significantly, was the style of interview. They asked brain-teasers, which I tend to think is a lousy way to scope out a candidate. Either you know the trick and can do it instantly, you get lucky or you need a hint. None of these really shows how smart you are, how well you can program a computer, interact with clients or, indeed, any other aspect of the job. The interviewer was also clearly working in the background while I was trying to answer the questions, only half listening, which was just plain rude.
Most communications were friendly and personal, right up to the last. The rejection email started, impersonally, "dear candidate."
So overall I'm not terribly impressed with Google recruitment. Okay, maybe I'm biased against them as they turned me down but as an interviewer I've always considered part of my job as leaving a positive impression of the company even with candidates that are not going to be hired. Google failed in this.
Building Bad Practices (Score:5, Interesting)
However, this position in the marketplace to shall pass and the bad habits of today will linger. There talking about now "standardizing" the interview process. What a novel concept. It only took this company five years to figure that one out. We did that in an afternoon in my own team at my former employer. I can't think why having 5000 engineers asking all different questions might not be a good thing.
Apparently nobody at Google has ever looked for a job before also from the TFA, taking two months to get back to someone after an "onsite" and to ask them for a "2nd round" interview. If I haven't heard from someone in two weeks after coming to there office, I am moving on at that point.
Finally, why are the co-founders still approving people to hire? Yes, I understand that the culture and the people you hire are important aspects of the firm. But were not talking about the first 100 employees anymore, were talking about employee 6,000 to 7,000. All this does is frustrate people inside the firm and job seekers.
This stupidity will cost and its going to cost Google shareholders about $1 billion. This is a small field and the number of talented people that Google is looking for are few. Someone is going to go through this process, get pissed off, and pull a YouTube, which Google will purchase. At that point, you will be able to put an actual value to how idiotic this process really is.
Disclaimer: No I have never interviewed with Google, nor do I plan to, but had many friends go through the process.
People who turned Google down? (Score:5, Interesting)
Kudos to the geek who puts OSS before a cushy job at Google and untold wealth in stock options.
Re:"Overqualified?" (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:2, Interesting)
I think you've taken this rejection very personally, and quite unprofessionally. I don't blame Google here- I wouldn't hire someone who made important decisions based on his poor little hurt emotions either.
Re:They hold nothing on Adm. Rickover (Score:3, Interesting)
Google should top hiring enginneers (Score:1, Interesting)
Concerning googles attempts to developer new technologies:
Too many engineers and too much money is a recipe for disaster on any new software product. The quality of the first release of any software is inversely proportional to amount of money available. A large budget does two things: 1) Makes it easier to hire too many people (please read Mythical Man Month) and 2) forces premature release of the product because the people who gave you the money want to see a return on their investment. That said, if you have enough money you can keep working on it and finally get it right in the third release (aka Microsoft), but that is the exception, not the rule.
p.s. I can't create an slashdot account - server gives me a 503 error, maybe someone at
Re:Google needs to grow up (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't need to give people my life story, 2 litres of blood, play puzzle pirates for 8 hours, and then good cop/bad cop. My experience speaks for itself - if you and I have the same hopes and strive for success and honesty - then we can probably work together.
Google really worries me - hiring smart people doesn't mean diddly. I know hundreds of smart people. Phd's, MA's, CIO's, CEO's. They're just like regular people, only smarter - which is to say there are hard workers, slackers, the ambitious, and the bums too. Some are ethical and honest, some aren't. Actual genius smart people tend to have more problems than others, in my limited experience anyway.
In other words - hiring smart people just because they're smart is no better than hiring from the general population in terms of success - what drives success isn't smartness but what employees are motivated (through various means, both personally and as a group) to accomplish. I'm not saying motivation alone drives people - only those that can be motivated.
I've actually taken hiring classes - from the former Director of HR at Southwest Air. They studied the problem for a decade. They tracked thousands of employees histories and finally came to a very simple solution.
There are people that just want a job, and there are people that want to suceed. For most jobs, skills are secondary and can be learned or classes taken for those that have the aptitude.
What matters most is "Hire success-driven people and you get a successful company."
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:4, Interesting)
I graduated from a tiny little religous college in Texas that few have probably ever heard of... My degree was not even in Computer science, it was Business administration. Yet, according to my recruiter I received very high scores going through the hiring process and received a great job offer. I have been at Google for longer than 2 years now.
Google demands smart people. The will hire them wherever they can find them, regardless of school or location around the world.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps a Stanford PhD is guaranteed to be smart, but a BA/BS/MBA is a different issue. Yale gave Mr. C-average (aka, G.W. Bush) a bachelor's degree, and Harvard gave him an MBA. He did become President, so they certainly picked a winner, but that doesn't mean he is smart rather that he is very well-connected.
>Clemson is a nationally recognized research university.
Hence a PhD from there should be a good researcher. However, Clemson is a public university with 12,000 undergrads and as such the quality of a BA/BS is going to be extremely varied (don't know if the Clemson poster had a BS, MS or PhD). Even Berkeley has sub-par students, and that is despite being the top public university in a state of over 30 million people (vs. only 4 million in South Carolina). I previously taught at Georgia Tech (another big public nationally recognized research university) and found that the top undergrads there were as good as anyone I taught while a grad student at Yale, but on average (although certainly not always) the Yale undergrads were better students.
Just interviewed with Google this summer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They hold nothing on Adm. Rickover (Score:3, Interesting)
There are critics of Rickover's program, particularly submariners in the Royal (UK) Navy, who recognize that good engineers don't necessarily make good naval commanders.
The point is that people like Rickover who are sticklers for details, have the balls to set and stick to high standards and survive in a large political organization like the US Navy come with certain quirks. At the end of the day results matter.
Keep in mind that many "great" public figures have quirks like this. Lyndon Johnson, who was unquestionably a political genius, conducted high level meetings from his bathroom throne and treated his loyal subordinates with a shocking level of disrespect. Abraham Lincoln's depression while president often kept him in bed. Henry Ford was a fascist.
Quit being Googlesheep (Score:1, Interesting)
This principle caused me to reject among others, INFY, YHOO, GOOG - ALL pre-IPO.
The most enjoyable interview experience I had was at another pioneering search company waaaay back in 94 (which was bought by AOL). We discussed more of my 3D art portfolio and the integrative/lateral thinking skills it represented even though the position and my main skillset was programming. Unfortunately I didnt take that offer either since they were a 1 hr commute away.
Sure as a consultant/entreprenuer I made probably 2x-3x less money as I would have at the said companies, but didn't change the end game of my career path at all - I still managed to stop working around 40, roam the world, cultivate avocations like filmmaking, writing etc, while also owning a home, providing for a homemaker spouse and a long-term disabled dependant.
Whenever I have had to hire, I ALWAYS hire a Friend, Relative or a FoF/FoR/RoR/RoF on a provisional basis, and keep them if they deliver to our satisfaction within a set observation period.
Arrogance of Google Recruiters (Score:3, Interesting)
google sux (Score:3, Interesting)
Page = University of Michigan graduate
These fools working at Google need to learn a thing or two about probability. The Intelligence distribution relative to the mean (measured by I.Q.) at Ivy League schools is nearly identical to that of state schools. Key phrase: relative to the mean. The only difference between the population in an Ivy and the population of (insert state school) is that the ivy's population has a higher average intelligence. What does this mean? There is a huge population of very bright individuals within the state university population that are just as smart or smarter than the average ivy leaguer. Brin and Page are an obvious example of this!
Why do Brin and Page play it up as if they're hot-shot Stanford grads? Do they not remember their roots in STATE UNIVERSITY? I've interviewed there myself and let me tell you: there is a subset of people working at Google that graduated from top schools and think they're the smartest and that nobody from a lesser school is worthy of working with them. If you interview with one of these people be very careful and be on your best.
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:3, Interesting)
Half of that is the interviewer's fault, for not setting expectations. Sometimes you want to see how they'd solve something in the real-world way, and sometimes you want to see how smart/resourceful they are by using contrived situations. "No, you can't ask your coworkers for help; they've all died in a bizarre skiing accident. And you must use this expensive, broken, completely inappropriate product as the basis of your code, because the CTO Has Spoken.[*]" If you made it clear which is which, some people would probably do much better.
I'm starting to wonder if I'm guilty of this myself - my favorite interview question is oversimplified and inherently inefficient. I basically expect them to accept the stupid specification as is (some whining is okay) yet implement it in a real-world way - I emulate "man", "gcc", and "gdb" for them. I try to make that clear, but maybe I could do better...
[*] - Sadly, this second part actually happens. I've seen "you must use Oracle RAC", and I've heard of much worse examples.
haha (Score:1, Interesting)
Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Every job I've ever seen them post has been for a guru. Who manages their hiring process for low-level tech support?
Too old. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Study hard at school kids (Score:3, Interesting)
Surely their ability to work within the team is going to be important, right?
Surely their ability to work with "cranky" clients is going to be important, right?
Surely their ability to come up with a novel solution to an intractable problem is going to be important, right?
Surely their ability to handle hiccups or other inevitable quirks in the work-flow is going to be important, right?
Surely their ability to communicate clearly and ask for clarification of objectives is going to be important, right?
Surely their ability to bring new ideas to the table and articulate the benefits of those ideas will be important, right?
I want to know that someone I hire can handle being part of a team. I want to know that they can deal with difficult people when they have to, and do it well. I want to know that they aren't going to waste their time on an approach that is clearly doomed and are able to balance time invested with time spent getting onto a new approach. I want to know that they are going to be able to handle a crisis WHEN (not if) it happens. I want to know that if they aren't sure about something that they will get clarification on it. I want to know that they are able examine a problem from multiple angles, and aren't afraid to defend a contrary point of view if it has merit.
I can ask someone how they'd deal with a difficult situation, or I can put them into one and see how they respond. One of those techniques is going to yield some useful information, the other will just let me know that the candidate has read a book on interviewing.
If I wanted a mere technician, I suppose that mere technical competence would be all I'd need. But short of the most entry-level work out there where there's no possibility to advance, I can't think of a job that has an interview process longer than "Can you work a cash register?" would value only mere competence.
Re:Well, they certainly need to change something.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, I know which one this was. I apologize for the mixup. I did route you to someone else after that because I was heading out of town and honestly I thought I wasn't the right person to interview you.
Chris
Eliminated in round 0 : no degree, no interview (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, I do have 10 years professional experience as a programmer in the USA [madbrain.com] at such high-profile companies as Computer Associates, Netscape Communications, America-Online, and Sun Microsystems, where I have been extremely successful, always one of the top-rated employees everywhere. I have actually been programming for 18 years, and turned 30 last june. I don't actually feel young anymore, but I would think I would still fit well with the corporate culture of Google. I bought a house in Silicon Valley at 21, I have been making 6 figures since 2000, and my career continued to flourish even during the dot-com bust.
However, my lack of degree made me a complete non-starter at Google. They wouldn't even schedule me for an interview. At least they didn't waste much of my time !
But the emails and calls from Google recruiters keep coming. This very morning, I got an email from another one about a possible 3 months temporary position as a software QA. I really went off on them about how mismatched that was for me, and told them to delete my resume from their database, since I just accepted a new job, at conditions sufficiently advantageous to guarantee a comfortable early retirement.
Google's stupidity in hiring practices was their loss, IMNSHO.