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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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?

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...

> What's in it for Google?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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