Hire by Google: Applicant tracking system and recruiting software (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Hire by Google: Applicant tracking system and recruiting software (2017)

hire.google.com

We're using it as our applicant tracking system.

My feeling is this is a separate team as it's in the end hosted on hire.withgoogle.com. Probably the team got acquired and it was initially run as an experiment. Anyway, this is just an assumption.

The tool is quite good and the price is not that high compared to others. It's like an add-on on top of G Suite compared to the built-in apps, but has pretty tight integration with GMail and Calendar.

You can configure it quite a bit and the only thing that seems to be inherited from Google own hiring practices is the interview scheduling where X number of people would do back-to-back interviews with the candidate. But this could also be worked around if not needed.

One thing which is a weak spot is the careers iframe you can embed. They also provide a JSON feed so you can render yourself, but the built-in rendering is so basic they basically force you not to use it.

Overall, we're pretty happy with it for the couple of months we've used it and it certainly is neither a blocker or an enabler of bad hiring practices as mentioned in some of the other comments.

> My feeling is this is a separate team as it's in the end hosted on hire.withgoogle.com. Probably the team got acquired and it was initially run as an experiment. Anyway, this is just an assumption.

You're correct, it was a startup they acquired - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bebop

Wow, so that's how Diane Greene ended up at Google? (she's now CEO of Google Cloud).

She also sits in Alphabet's Board of Directors: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/board.html

IIRC, she's been there since 2012. Her role in Google [Cloud] came much after.

I wanted to purchase subscription to Google Hire. I literally had the credit card in my hand. But there was no way to pay. Not even a way to sign up for a free trial right away. I called them several times, no response.

More than a month later, someone finally responded. The person sounded like he is doing me a favor by getting back. In the meantime I started using another ATS that worked well for us. The salesperson response was effectively, "duh ... we are Google".

I see they have the pricing online now: https://hire.google.com/request-demo/. But still no way to pay or sign up for a trial right away.

They must not really want the people at large to use it. Maybe it’s part of some other bigger discussion they’re having. Maybe as part of the pitch to get a government contract. “If you give us the contract, we have a hiring tool that the stakeholders can use”.

The value google may see would be in building machine learning models from data we manually feed in for them. What was the name of the ATS that you eventually selected?

I signed up to see what it looks like. I immediately received this email

  Thank you so much for your interest in Hire by Google. Here's [0] a short 
  video demo to see Hire in action. For more in-depth info on Hire features, 
  check out our YouTube channel [1]. 
  You can also sign up for a live Hire demo webinar here. [2]

  An annual license for Hire is just $100/month for companies 
  with less than 25 employees, and $200/month for companies with 
  26-50 employees.

  If you're ready to move forward, just reply to this email and I'll be 
  happy to send you an order form to add Hire to your G Suite account. 
  Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions.

  Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

  PS - If you are larger than 50 employees let me know and we can provide a quote.

[0] https://info.hire.bebop.co/Introduction-to-Hire.html

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs0N4b7N8wLY6_4ZHar70Cg/vid...

[2] https://info.hire.bebop.co/HireWebinarSeries.html

So much FUD about Google collecting "data" in this thread, from people who think data is just automatically equivalent to heaps of money.

This is a paid software product for businesses, which makes Google money and has a strict data usage policy saying "G Suite customers own their data, not Google. The data that G Suite organizations and users put into our systems is theirs, and we do not scan it for advertisements nor sell it to third parties."

https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...

Disclaimer: I do work at El Goog, but not on this product. I just find the vague wolf-crying annoying.

What about scanning it not for advertising? Like, say, ML training (as speculated elsewhere in this thread)? Seems like that statement could’ve been much stronger if Google actually meant that.

Seriously, the page I've linked to is 2 paragraphs, just read it.

It explicitly states that data IS used for ML training, to provide useful features to the customers:

"Google indexes customer data to provide beneficial services, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spellcheck and the ability to search for emails and files within an individual account."

Individual customer agreements may have more specifications on top, but I don't think any rational company in the world would ask for email without spam filtering because of some abstract fear of machine learning or "scanning" of data.

Other posters seem to have concerns about google siphoning data from this product. I wouldn’t be especially worried about that.

A much bigger concern for me would be that this product is not and will never be core to google’s business. Will it be around a year from now? Will be around but utterly neglected as whatever opaque process inside google causes it to lose interest in yet another project?

I’d rather buy recruiting software from a company in the recruiting software business.

This looks like a bonus freebie for gsuite users who up til now didn't care to use any applicant tracking service.

Which is a bit weird because the main buyer of G Suite is a CIO, and presumably its Finance/Payroll/HR making the final decision on the hiring software.

I have always thought that Google generally siphons data from the product and once they have enough of the data that they need then the project they shut it down.

>* I have always thought that Google generally siphons data from the product and once they have enough of the data that they need then the project they shut it down. *

Or if the tool competes with another. I think Reader was killed mainly because it competed with Google Plus.

In general, I've noticed many sites now lack RSS feeds - probably because it's better to have users perpetually engaged than give a definitive list of articles that can be read in 1 go.

I don't remember a time when many sites didn't lack RSS feeds.

>A much bigger concern for me would be that this product is not and will never be core to google’s business.

I think it depends. Is this an internal tool they decided to monetize? If they're dogfooding it's much less likely they'll cancel it

> If they're dogfooding it's much less likely they'll cancel it

I think it's just as likely. Another team will create a different product doing the same thing in a different way and they will now dogfood that new one.

.... umm, no.

If anything they will just change it up and disappoint people who liked it just the way it was.

As they are doing with GMail.

They did create “Inbox” to do the same thing as GMail (email) in a different way... But they’re killing Inbox and just making changes to GMail.

...which kind of pisses me off because I use Inbox.

Google most certainly does not use this extremely SMB tool to recruit and hire for themselves at any relevant scale.

Hiring employees efficiently is likely a part of Google's core business and practice.

This is the product that evolved from the Bebop acquisition (Diane Greene's company that was acquired to bring her in to lead Google Cloud).

Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bebop#section-overvi...

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839646

What's next? Google CRM? Google ERP? Similar story to Microsoft' invoicing system that had been rolled out a while back. The smaller players will most likely get pushed out (even if their product is better but offers less horizontally), sometimes while paying for computing power on the platform that is competing with them.

Since when are Google's hiring practices good? As many of us experienced, the process is dismal and extremely disrespectful with the candidates. They get away with it because of their fame.

  * Bad scheduling of phone interviews
  * No answers for long swaths of time
  * 1 liner rejection emails
  * Terrible matching of skills vs jobs
    (e.g. offering entry level SRE to experienced people)
  * Cookie-cutter interviews

Now, what makes me wonder is why are they making this system? What's in it for Google? And good luck expecting them to keep it up for more than a couple of years.

> What's in it for Google?

Data, presumably?

Also expanding the capabilities of their GSuite to capture more customers into their ecosystem

I think that’s it: it seems everyone (at least Google and Microsoft) is going after SAP and salesforce to become the infrastructure of businesses.

Enterprise offerings have strict data usage guidelines.

Aka Google can't use the data. https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...

They're probably pretty good at the logistics of hiring, which this product seems to be focused on. The performance of individual Google recruiters shouldn't impact it.

Just their hiring practices. One line rejections are not a ‘single recruiter’ thing.

But their experience is quite unusual. They have many people keen to join them so they can do stupid things and not notice it. Most other companies don't have this magnet to favor them.

Have you tried hiring in tech recently? Good candidates disappear after a week. You have to move fast. And even if you are good many candidates slip through your fingers. I doubt Google's Hire service would help me much on that.

  * You need someone at least slightly technical to screen CVs.
  * Then screen round 2 with truly technical people,
    ideally from target teams.
  * Then figuring out if any of the job openings is a match for
    the candidate (from language to expected job position)
  * Then a very personal call with them
  * Then a single planned-ahead phone interview with goals
    (e.g. is the candidate really competent with X)
  * Then interview on-site in a single afternoon/morning
    (take them to lunch!)
  * Offer should be in a short time, ideally the day of
    the on-site interviews.

Or you can do what most people do and just offer 30% above market, cross your fingers, and see what sticks.

If "most people" offer 30% above market, isn't that the new market rate?

It's not a simple thing. For 30% I wouldn't switch my job to a random company whose first impression is hiring incompetence.

You should switch. Worst case scenario you get back to your current company in a few months with a 30% pay rise.

Or you could hire people no one else is hiring because they don't look like good candidates even though they are. You could build a system to do that.

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

> Build work-sample tests. Instead of asking questions about the kind of work you do, have candidates actually do the work. Careful. I am not saying candidates should spend a 2-week trial period as a 1099 contractor. That’s a terrible plan: the best candidates won’t do it. But more importantly: it doesn’t work. Unlike a trial period, work sample tests have all three of these characteristics: they mirror as closely as possible the actual work a candidate will be called on to perform in their job, they’re standardized, so that every candidate faces the same test, they generates data and a grade, not a simple pass/fail result.

Work samples are the only thing that have ever proved to be consistent indicators about a candidate. The only other thing that even comes close is pair programming with someone on the hiring team, and you can have the pair do a work sample anyway.

Your pipeline is inefficient. Too many phone calls.

    * Review the resume.
    * Send Hackerrank test
    * 1 hour phone interview with the team lead
    * one day or half day onsite
    * offer

Hiring is a two-way street, if you send me a Hackerrank test before I've spoken to someone about the basics you will have immediately lost me as a candidate. Not even Google is this deaf to the human side of hiring.

This is a really important point that many companies don’t seem to care about. Some companies seem to operate on the assumption that everyone absolutely wants to work for them and that applicants will spent lots of time.

This lack of respect of or recognition of the value of applicants time will filter out what’s likely your most desired applicants, people with low amounts of time due to current employment or lots of leads.

There needs to be some interaction with the applicant to show you are worthy of a mini project or multi-hour hackerrank test. Your job description better be amazing with details to motivate an applicant to spend time on a test off the bat.

It's crazy how you complain about the lack of recognition for your time but refuse the shortest pipeline of interview. It's much easier to take a quick coding test online anytime, than to schedule phone interviews with HR and hiring managers.

How do you know as the one being recruited these tests are not sent to 100 other programmers. Wasting time without wasting the recruiters time too is a no-go for me unless I would be desperate.

As a candidate, the shortest pipeline is one I can exit after a 30 minute chat with the hiring manager.

I don't refuse the shortest pipeline of interview. I'm a big fan of pretty intensive interviews, both giving and taking.

My issue is about the shotgun approach of many recruiters. I don't mind taking a coding test, I think they're great. It's frustrating to have to take a coding test to find out the area of the company, or pay grade, or basic position info. Or being put into a phone screening for a Java position because the recruiter mixed up Java and JavaScript, etc. etc.

This gets worse with the higher level of effort test. I think that it helps when companies describe the position well. Otherwise it takes some sort of knowledge of each other before I think it's worth actually dedicating time.

It may be different if you're looking for a job full time while unemployed. But spending 10 hours of time is only something I'll consider if I think I'd take the position should the org want to hire me.

It's a three way street. One third of candidates don't try, one third can't do the only question that is to print numbers from 1 to N, one third succeed.

It saves a lot of time for everyone. Including time for the phone call with the team lead/manager where you will have the opportunity to discuss the role and the company in much greater details.

I'm hiring into Dublin, Ireland, I think the expectations around timelines are different for me, especially if the candidate will be relocating.

I don't remember having anyone enter the pipeline and leave it again by their own choice before we've made an offer. I do remember there being one candidate who got dropped somehow who got pissed off at how long things were taking, but that was human error (or arguably bad tooling) more than bad process.

> take them to lunch!

Heh some years ago while interviewing at the Googleplex, I was forgotten about over lunchtime. It was overall a weird interview experience, even though I ended up getting an offer. I definitely get more ruthless and efficient when I am hungry, so maybe that's why I did okay. But it was still an eye-opening experience, and not in a good way.

> What's in it for Google?

Control and data? Perhaps they have something dystopian in mind?

Edit: It is also another reason to hide from Google.

> Perhaps they have something dystopian in mind?

Oh come on. We've all conceded the days of "Don't be evil" are long gone but Google's type of evil hasn't quite shifted to that of cackling supervillain. It's an evil bred from arrogance, naivety and self-interest - not from an active intent to corrupt society.

In other words: It's the same kind of evil as all real evil, not the kind of evil that is purely fictional. Your point being?

I think you're making the same point as me in that case. It was morningcoffee that had James Bond supervillains in mind.

IC--I read them more as "something that is dystopian" rather than "something that is intended to be dystopian".

Gsuite is not free and it’s unclear if this product is even included as an addin for existing members. I see more “see a demo” and less “activate your account” which leads me to believe there will be a fee. So the answer would be revenue and more reasons for companies to use gsuite since it’s all likely integrated together.

There is a pricing page with bundle prices going from $100 to $400/mo for companies up to 100 Gsuite licenses, and the customary "talk to sales" call to action beyond that.

At this moment Google can destroy almost any SME they like simply by deranking them. They don't have to explain anything either. They just flip a bit, and poof, your livelihood is gone.

But what if you're not a business owner? Oh no, they can't destroy your life on demand! This must be solved!

Google Hire is here to transparently remove all hate-speakers, hate-thinkers and potentially bad people from your hiring lists! Don't worry, we'll find someone else to employ,while those Google-haters rot in misery, unemployed untill they kill themselves. And the best part? We aren't a dictatorship, because technically we're a private corporation! Buy now!

Two long-term aspects, in my point of view :

- social AI and automation challenge : recruitment is a process where humans are important and cannot be replaced for now, because of the soft and reassuring aspect of human interactions. The call centers and this will provide nice playfields to make AI more "humans".

- data : what could you do if you had access to all the contents of the job offers in the market, the people motivations, and the timeline of all interactions? That's something they may already have access to by buying data from providers, but with that they go to the source.

Given the quantity of actors in the online recruitment service field, it is not surprising to watch Google enter the arena.

I'm not so certain it's for the data. If it were, then I would assume that the pricing would be much more competitive.

> What's in it for Google?

It's part of GSuite so $$$. You have to pay for GSuite.

I didn't experience most of the points above but I completely agree on the very bad match of skills vs job: that happened to me just a couple of months ago.

> What's in it for Google?

It is a commercial offering: https://hire.google.com/pricing/

This is the software for the logistics of hiring, not "hiring as a service", so I dont think that the things you point out have much to with this unless other companies that purchase this software are guilty of the same things.

Those issues are due to policies, not software. For example, Google has "cookie cutter interviews" because they intentionally hire most devs as generalists. But another company doesn't have to do the same thing, even if they're using the same tech.

I'd describe Google's interaction with applicants as more average than dismal. Ghosting is far more common than you'd think (hence the recent stories about employees ghosting back twice as hard), and if you want utterly clueless ask a coworker who's done classified work about how incompetent Beltway-bandit recruiters and HR departments are.

Google is in publicly collected health care data. Google is in surveillance via location service. Google is browser tracking.

Presumably if you want to apply for a job with a company that uses Google Hire you won’t be opt out of Google processing your personal data.

It’s the candidate “discovery” feature that worries me the most. Howlong before Google offersto prefilter candidates it thinks are bad eggs based on the profile it’s building on you?

Which in turn would naturally include anybody Google has chosen to blacklist from their services for whatever opaque reason. Google's vision of the future seems to have changed fairly starkly in recent years and in a very bad way. Hopefully this is yet another Google service flop because the alternative is edging rapidly towards dystopia.

So when is it shutting down?

This is a GSuite product, so most likely it's not going away for a long time.

This seems to be around since 2017. What am I missing?

So far Google is not sure about good talent other companies hire. Now with this system, they can use AI/ML to steal the potential job quitter earlier than he is hired by the competitor.

Well done guys!

How is this not an antitrust issue, particularly considering past wage supression behaviors?

Hypothetical scenarios are not antitrust issues.

Please read this: https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...

Read above. No where I mentioned about Ads.

I'm wondering when the Google brand is going to go down in reputation.

It seems to me that the majority still sees them as a badge of engineering excellence and firmly believe that people working there are way above average. I don't think that's the case anymore despite the huge amount of associated koolaid.

This product is a typical example of Google using their brand name to get a product out that otherwise nobody would even look at.

This is an excellent observation about white-labeling.

If they get interview scheduling integrations right they are already better than 99% of everything else out there.

They used to not even offer a demo, and on the phone they were pretty glib about paying for a year to try it out. The fatal flaw was that since it’s not part of an HRMS system it’s not integrated into the whole employee lifecycle, so other solutions made more sense. We went with BambooHR which also has ATS along with everything else you need and was pretty cheap.

Is all your data private or google using all the data. It doesn't seem explicit on the feature page.

This is a negative business model and should be subject to anti-trust. It's another ruse to hoover up more data by Google. How are software companies going to compete with a google subsidized alternative?

Tomorrow google could attack other software verticals with their vampire data collection business model with negative dystopian externalities for society, businesses and their employees.

Who is going to pay for all the software employees made redundant by these kinds of business models? This is a kind of dumping which is illegal in most economic systems.

You consider selling software for a monthly fee (with the price starting at $100/month) to be a negative business model? Just how much do you think the price should have been to not count as "subsidized"?

The pricing is wrong. It is based on the size of the company. It should be based on the number of candidates/resumes in pipeline.

a testimonial from that page:

> Scheduling interviews used to take a long time, but now it takes just a few clicks

The software must be pretty basic if that's a featured quote. What were the deciding factors for who they reach out to for these quotes? If that's one of the better answers, my respect for HR people has sunk to a new low.

I'm looking for the counterpart: An offer/application/headhunter/company tracking system

Given that there are dominating ATS products like Lever, Greenhouse, etc, this will likely just quietly shut-down in a few years.

We need to break up Google ASAP.

The Google Applicant tracking system is most hostile toward deaf job applicants, EVAH!

How so?

Ah yes, yet another applicant tracking system that will likely not solve any of the problems the other ones have had. Especially since I presume this has been an internal tool for some time.

It doesn't matter if it is good or bad. It matters that vendor locking potential becomes greater.

From what I understand from talking to Google recruiters, this is likely way better than their internal tool. Their internal tool is apparently awful.

how did this make it onto HN? for some privacy bashing?

srsly, why is this interesting in the slightest?

A candidate's CV contains all sorts of personal data, their detailed work and academic history, their contact details and work eligibility, maybe their date of birth, address and personal interests. And it's being served up to Google on a silver plate by this service! This is obviously a blatant attempt to enrich their (shadow) profiles on people.

They failed miserably in the social networking domain, still trying their best to collect complete detailed self-declared personal profiles.

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