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> Here's an interesting anecdote, I've applied to Google directly, for specific positions I would be qualified for, about a half dozen times and gotten crickets each time. Then out of the blue, months later, I'll get contacted via Linkedin by a recruiter who ends up funneling me into filling a position I couldn't possibly fulfill -- and I'm very open about that up front. I've even sent open job reqs back to the recruiter that I thought I'd be better for, but some kind of internal momentum has dictated that I'm now in the queue for some job I don't want and wouldn't qualify for anyways.

Been there, done that, got the logo water bottle. I told the recruiters multiple times that I was fundamentally a systems/embedded developer and that I wanted a systems/embedded job (despite currently working in NLP). I was told they would make sure my rotation included people from those groups. I show up, and it's all guys from Search and Maps who want to ask me NLP and ML questions. :| The interview group was so far off my background and interests that one guy literally had to scrap all the questions he planned to ask. Overall it was a huge waste of time for everyone involved and money for Google, and has permanently turned me off the company.

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.)

> I'm sure I'm just a number to make sure the hiring manager passes some internal threshold so that they can hire the person they want anyways

This is definitely not the case, because we don't have hiring managers (at least in engineering; there are parts of the company that this post doesn't apply to). The system has been designed to definitively prevent that sort of thing from happening. Nobody can say "I want that person" and hire them. You feed people into the hiring pipeline, they get interviewed by a series of calibrated peers, and then a separate committee of people who have never met the candidate reviews the interview feedback. There is no way for any single individual to get somebody hired. This largely removes personal biases from the outcome.

As for your own experiences, the key thing to understand here is that our hiring processes are designed to have a high false negative rate and a near-zero false positive rate. It is explicitly a goal to pass up on many capable people in exchange for not hiring any bad ones. It's not perfect, and there are ways in which people are working to improve the system, but for the most part it's doing what it's designed to do.

> As for your own experiences, the key thing to understand here is that our hiring processes are designed to have a high false negative rate and a near-zero false positive rate. It is explicitly a goal to pass up on many capable people in exchange for not hiring any bad ones. It's not perfect, and there are ways in which people are working to improve the system, but for the most part it's doing what it's designed to do.

Which is precisely why all small companies should do something completely different from Google.

Google is virtually guaranteed to get applications from the majority of people in the field, so gets very low cost for a high false-negative rate.

Arguably, it should actually be the other way around. If you make a bad hire, you increase the proportion of bad hires in your company by 1/NUM_EMPLOYEES. For Google, NUM_EMPLOYEES is very large, so making a bad hire is not disastrous for Google and they can probably get along for awhile. For smaller companies with <100 employees, you're increasing the proportion of bad hires in your company by entire percentage points every time you make a single bad hire.

If the company I work for had the false-negative rate that google likely has we would be able to hire less than one developer per year.

Perhaps other people are lucky in that they've avoided the impacts a bad hire can cause but I can say with certainty that the "right" bad hire can make life hell for a large number of people. They may not know or care about how to properly do their jobs but they know how to kiss ass and know full well how risk averse HR is in a big corporation and will use that to their advantage. It can dramatically impact morale for entire teams or even departments if they're in a management position.

Why do other people have to be "lucky"? I have argued before that having good management and the right processes mitigates the damage bad hires can do. Maybe those other people structure and run their organizations such that the "right" bad hire is impossible.

> As for your own experiences, the key thing to understand here is that our hiring processes are designed to have a high false negative rate and a near-zero false positive rate.

So why in the world would you create your Rework site, espousing the "amazing" insights you guys have about HR and management processes, knowing that only a tiny select few others could survive with this model?

99.9% of companies cannot afford your rather snobby attitude of "were cool with losing 100 very good workers as long as we don't hire 1 wrong one".

I mean, it's not like the guy was involved in that site :) But in any case the hiring tips in it seem applicable to a good range of companies to me.

Why? Because their applicant pool is too small? Or because the cost of doing that many interviews is so steep? Or something else?

I intuitively had the exact opposite reaction: most companies can't afford to hire any bad people, but large companies with lots of resources actually can. If google's rate of poor hiring was higher than average, they'd still survive, at least in the short term, because they're so large and profitable.

Yeah, I've heard similar from other folks I know inside Google so the process you describe sounds right. What I can't seem to figure out is how candidates are matched against openings...as an outsider who's been banged up against a half-dozen really obviously bad matches, it's kind of bizarre.

It's not even normal recruiter-trying-to-make-their-candidate-quota wrong...it's toothpaste and orange juice level mismatches. I have a feeling that the high, unchecked, false-negative rate contributes.

On the positive side, all the Googlers who I've spoken with through the various interviews have been smart and pleasant.

So the one thing that you might be missing is that in the engineering org, we don't hire into a job or team, we hire into a ladder. While individual job openings exist and drive the number of people that we're looking to hire at a site, during the recruiting process you aren't really being matched to those. If the job opening is for a SWE, then you get a generic SWE recruiting process and interview panel. If you pass that, then the site managers will figure out which SWE roles at that site you would best fit into - but because everything we do is secret, as an outsider you are basically unable to have any useful input into that process, you just cannot know enough about it before you're hired. The public versions of job postings are missing most of the important details, and the way we do things is too different. We're also far more interested in skills than experience.

Moving between teams is easy once you've been hired (because you've already passed the generic interview for your ladder), and at that point you'll have enough information to make an informed choice. People are expected to move around, and do. This has got a lot to do with why the hiring process works the way it does: you're being hired for all the future jobs you'll do, not the one you get assigned to on day one.

(If this was about roles outside the engineering org, I have no knowledge of how hiring works for those)

> On the positive side, all the Googlers who I've spoken with through the various interviews have been smart and pleasant.

This is in some sense both the goal of our hiring process and the evidence that it's working well.

> Google's process is so bad from the applicant standpoint

That's an artifact of a time when Google believed that working for them is a privilege, and qualitatively better than working for any other company, so you should be willing to eat shit for the chance to do it. Well, they probably still believe it.

> a time when Google believed that working for them is a privilege

I don't see that that has really changed. It doesn't help the number of people that also still believe it though.

I thought Google's hiring process was very fair and considerate, even though I initially felt I had done poorly on their interview.

Don't get me wrong, I think the process, once you're in the chute, is fair and relatively impartial (and about on par with any large company I've ever worked for). It's the matchmaking process beforehand that's a mess.

My experience with their process is it is impartial to the point of being inhuman -- Like, Google is so thoroughly obsessed with "making the perfect decision" that they ignore the fact that candidates are actual human beings, not "machines with a programming attribute that can be rated with a scale of 1 to 10, and we'll take the 8s while passing on the 7s", and if after a day of interviews we're not sure whether we've got an 8 or 7, we'll throw it through the evaluations again.