What Google recruiters look for in a technical resume | Hacker News Reader

What Google recruiters look for in a technical resume

leetresumes.com

38 pointsmcenedella69 comments

Something else that is never mentioned in these resume resources is the role diversity plays in hiring decisions at big companies like google. If you are a minority or female include something in your resume such as "member of women in tech club" or "latinx student union vise president". Having those kind of key words in your resume can be as significant as having a PHD in ML. There is significant pressure at those companies to hit diversity goals.

Not exaggerating this is what google recruiters I know have told me .

So true.

That's pretty sad though if that is more important than a PhD

honestly, its harder to recruit technical women than it is men with PhD's

Damn I need to start making my ethnicity working for me. But I suppose there's no point since I can't pass their leetcode style interviews :)

It's really staggering how different my job search process is from my male friends, especially since I work in an ultra-male dominated niche. For them, it's like begging in the street for an offer. For me, it's like strolling through the supermarket and selecting which one I want. I have literally only once interviewed and not gotten an offer.

People get upset when I speak about this, because it's taboo to say women have it easier (in some aspects) in the tech world. But I try to be vocal about my experiences, in an effort to encourage more girls to go into tech. After all, what better incentive is there than fantastic pay that's easy to get?

You should definitely be open about it. Lots of girls in school have no exposure and think a field is hard to get into because they don’t know anyone there.

People forget how “far away” something looks to people not in the know.

They don't view preferential resume screening to be bias. Bias is only at the interview stage, the rest is the "pipeline", all they do is put more women in the "pipeline" by accepting resumes from women that wouldn't be accepted if they were men. They then have to pass the same interview process, so the entire process is "fair".

I'm not sure if that would hold in court though. And I bet many would argue that such treatment isn't really fair, that interview screening isn't a part of the recruitment pipeline and instead is a part of the assessment and therefore should be unbiased.

The unsaid subtext of all this...

Google receives multiple job applications per second all day long.

The recruiters want to get the key information to fill in their webform, from your CV, in as few seconds as possible.

Nobody is going to read every word, even on a one-pager.

I intentionally redesigned my resume to counter this a few years ago (or well, I guess several years ago now)

It's 3 very dense pages, has skills in the margin, images to represent some things, goes extremely in depth about my background

I apply to jobs thoughtfully, I want the places hiring me to have taken the time to look at my resume. Specifically, I wanted to discourage recruiters who scan for skill "X for years Y" and immediately pick up the phone.

I've been told I got an interview because my resume goes so in depth into who I am and what I want out of a position more than once, but of course ymmv as this article shows. It also helps if you're the one getting recruiters and not the other way around

With most big companies, the trick is either to have a CV which is amenable to fast and easy classification by human recruiters and sorts well against other candidates in a spreadsheet... Or to have a referral from an existing employee, which typically bypasses the CV-filter step.

Your dense-CV approach isn't going to work for any company with a pile of tens of thousands of CV's to sort through...

The referral is more important than anything else. That way the recruiter isn’t to blame if the interview goes bad. “Oh, sorry, that was Dave’s friend”

Google doesn't care much about referrals though. I referred a friend of mine to Google and he was rejected without them even talking to him, then he sent the application normally and got an interview without the referral. I know he was rejected since they told me as well that sadly my referral wasn't needed. I still got the referral bonus so it wasn't that they tried to trick me, but most would have given up after that first rejection but I'm glad he didn't.

So I work at a large-ish company, not FAANG large but public company, ~50B market cap, ~5k employees

And their recruiter reached out to me without issue.

And recruiters from FAANG companies regularly reach out to me, I'm pretty sure at this point they reach out to anyone with certain companies listed on their LinkedIn profiles

I mentioned this below, but it's not like I turned my whole resume into a JPG or something, it's still searchable/indexable

It's just not optimized for skimming, which I like.

The thing is once they index and find the person with experience and the tech they want, I also want them to be willing to give a resume that looks different a chance.

Have you used it to apply at big companies or at smaller ones? At big companies the process is likely more "industrialized" where the reader of your CV can't even put a checkmark equating "has deep resume" because the designers of their tool haven't thought of it, while at smaller ones the process is condensed to a single person maybe, who can apply human reason to your CV.

The thing is I don't want to work at a place that's just giving people with the right keyword soup interviews anyways. My resume is still using human language, if they're just searching for a certain tech it will show up.

But from there, if the recruiter is looking for easiest resumes to parse... they'll immediately recoil and move on

For me that's a feature not a bug. I'm at the point in my career where it's generally assumed I'll be capable of giving technical interviews, and nothing sucks more than being on the receiving end a recruitment funnel that's more focused on cookie cutter applications than the actual applicant...

I also don't want to work on a team that passed up capable people who just happen to have missed the resume meta

And fwiw, I work at fairly large company, not FAANG large, but ~5k employees, market cap ~50B, and TC is also about in line with FAANG I'd say, at least at my level. We have a ton of ex-FAANG coincidentally...

I was contacted by a recruiter of theirs who recognized a previous company I worked at and wanted to chat (very small company, tiny, so I was surprised that was what got them to bite)

This tweet highlights what they look for in a Junior Dev's resume: https://twitter.com/shaft/status/1355696154990628864?s=19

Does someone know what "top 10% ER referral" means in this context? What does ER stand for?

Does anyone know what the remote work situation is these days with Google? Specifically, is this a good time for folks in flyover states like myself to apply to these SV companies and land remote positions?

Google isn't as welcoming of remote work as a model, but other tech companies are. Go for it!

Is Google still a coveted place to work in the US? Sounds kind of implausible, I was reminded of the excellent "are we the baddies?" video posted here a few weeks ago :)

very, very, very much so. their salaries are among the highest in a high paid industry. additionally, they are among the best employers to have on a resume if you want to approach vc investors about a project of your own.

Given their product grave yard, why would google being on your resume be a good indicator of success for vc investors?

i think people tend to remember google's successes more than their failures, because google's successes massively, overwhelmingly outweigh their failures.

[edit] as an example, people don't think of the Fire Phone with they think of Jeff Bezos.

A VC isn't going to give you a coding test so they use "worked at google" as a proxy. Also presumably the developer/founder made enough money at google that they could probably stretch out whatever seed money you give them a lot further.

Totally agreed. Google is known to have a more-reliable-and-thoughtful-than-many hiring process. It is a powerful credential.

Because they are picky and hard to get in to.

To a VC who has very few other ways to asses you, having something in you past that singles you out as someone who has already cleared a highly selective process means you are more likely to be the kind of person who succeeds.

Nothing to do with Google's own products. Any other club similar difficult to get into will convey the same signal.

It's a crude signal, but it's a signal.

exactly. stanford and harvard serve as similarly crude signals.

Google engineers typically have little little to no say in product direction, and most Google products fails for that reason and not technical reasons. So knowing that someone is a Google engineer tells you that they have at least decent technical skills, and doesn't tell you anything at all about their product skills since they didn't make product decisions at Google.

So if they with presentations or such manage to convince you of their product vision they are a very attractive founder, as they then have both product vision and the technical skills to not get tricked into hiring shitty engineers to build it for them.

the colors luke, the colors.

unless the VC is colorblind.

Their salaries are not that high. They love to down-level candidates (if you're a senior engineer now, they'll usually try and hire you as an intermediate engineer) which comes with a pretty big pay gap.

Their salaries are definitely up there but plenty of successful startups pay much more.

For total comp, they've done pretty well historically due to their increasing stock price.

the startups that can compete with Google on salary are more likely to be "pre-IPO" companies than "start-ups." most technical roles at Google are in the $200-400k range. ya, maybe companies like OpenDoor and Plaid can pay that, but your average Series A start-up can't

> Their salaries are not that high.

> Their salaries are definitely up there but plenty of successful startups pay much more.

These two statements doesn't match up. Google pays extremely high wages. There are jobs that pay better, but mostly at companies that are like Google or very small companies. If you measure by number of jobs then I don't think there are more jobs at companies paying more than Google and Facebook than there are jobs at Google and Facebook. So if you want that level of pay Google and Facebook is the easiest way to get it, which also means that Google and Facebook will be the main target employers for many candidates.

They're always going to be a target for some people, not necessarily the same people that thought highly of them a decade ago.

I think most people still covet google. However, given the hiring process, notorious interviews, propensity of product failures, declining core product quality, and periodic ethical issues, I feel like maybe it's undeserved.

Sure. There are some serious cultural and product issues, but it's generally respected as hiring stronger people than most and has top-tier comp packages.

Recently they've been lagging behind Facebook on comp. It's kinda funny, when recruiter is apologizing in advance, that they won't be able to match existing offer, but still suggesting to go through a whole day of interviews, which he promises will be harder than Facebook's.

Luckily, they have Facebook to set the floor.

    Increased server query response time by 15% by restructuring API

... is that a good example?

No, and it really shows quite how detached from the tech these recruiters are...

Source: I invented the flux capacitor equivalent of the retro encabulator, so should know a thing or two about this!

Well, you probably want to decrease response time but otherwise yes. It's good to give objective metrics for your accomplishments. Also helps to frame the interview. "I see here you improved the response time of an API by 15%, tell me about that".

Even if your current employer let's you talk about specific numbers, without context they don't tell the recruiter anything.

"The API latency was 10 seconds, now it's 8.5 seconds."

"I reduced the p99.9 latency from 1 sec to 400ms" (by removing input validation)

If the best thing you did was take an API from 10 to 8.5 it's probably best to tell the recruiter as little as possible.

Your second line is improvement for sure. But it follows the same basic advice to give numbers

A recruiter doesn't understand technical terms, to them that is an as good explanation as any other. And the interviewers later typically don't care about your resume, so it doesn't matter there either.

However the people deciding if you get hired and what level you get hired at, and the engineering managers who decide if they want you on their team, they understand that it is a bad explanation and care about it. Now there is such a lack of candidates passing the interviews that you will probably get a position anyway, but the position you get might be shit.

The candidate is under pressure to impress the recruiter so they might put in fluff, but the recruiter is also under pressure to make sure their services get retained too. At our company, we stop working with agencies/recruiters who send us a large number of junk resumes. I imagine its the same situation at many companies.

Google only has inhouse recruiters. Although the churn of those is extremely high, I'm not sure exactly how it works but I think they get fired after 6 months if they haven't managed to hire enough candidates or if they waste interviewers time with too many bad candidates. You could think that the process means they have good recruiters, but since the churn is extremely high Google has a ton of inexperienced recruiters working there at all times.

I see.. I was not aware of the internals at Google. Thanks for pointing it out.

Follows the STAR method, which they likely look for too.

15% quantifies the Resulting impact of your work succinctly.

ALL. THAT. MATTERS. IS. LEETCODE.

Forget everything on every blog about working in tech. All that matters is leetcode.

L5+ (E5+ in FB) requires strong system design interviews for engineers.

100% agree.

Wrap your head around leetcode first.

Once you feel comfortable (memorize?), pramp or similar.

Resume just needs 3 things experience (each point needs to invite questions. i.e. a conversation starter), accomplishments(optionl) and education.

Leetcode matters for junior roles. Interviews for senior roles generally include system design questions and you won't learn how to answer those well from Leetcode.

“It's also critical you list your GitHub profile or other prominent open source work that shows us you're contributing to the open source community, passionate about the work you're doing, and looking to improve your skills.”

Is this still top advice?

If you have done opensource work, it's totally worth listing it. People who code in their free time have a higher chance of success at places like Google.

If you haven't, it isn't a dealbreaker.

If you have something to show, sure. In my experience most engineers, even "Big Four" ones, have empty Github profiles.

That's why I was asking. For the most part my experience and anecdotes matched up with almost everything in the article expect that piece. Just wanted to get some other opinions.

YMMV but when I was still in school about 6 years ago, I was told my github was why I was chosen over candidates with degrees for my first industry position.

i remember a similar 2001 article on what google crawlers look for in a website -- and today the web is a littered with space debris.

Sometimes I feel like just letting go of all this and trying to live out of my kayak.

>Typos might seem like a small matter, but many engineering managers have learned that engineers who aren’t careful with their resumes, also aren’t careful with their code. Be smart about it and check very carefully.

Ugh. What even is this. Name me a compiler that is going to put up with a typo? Verilog, maybe. It'll just be like "Oh yeah this could be a wire". As long as you have no linting. But really, no.

This is the sort of advice you get from people who know so little your field of expertise that the best they can do is spell check it. That may well be the first line of Google's recruitment team, but that tells you more about Google's requirements than anything else- put at the top of your checklist - inovation? No. creativity? No. Spelling! Yes!

I mispelled innovation just there.... did it prevent you understanding me?

It's not that literal. A developer not passing their resume through a spellchecker to catch typos shows that they are careless. Yes, every decent compiler and all linters are going to catch typos. What happens when that developer has to design a new API and doesn't even double-check their work?

That is quite literally unimaginable at a company like Google.

The problem with giving advice on such matters is that human psychology doesn't work by strict rules of logic and reason, and repeatable experiments are often not possible. Even if you can "prove" (if there is such a thing) certain traits of a candidate are more valuable than others, you can't prevent others from judging you on trivial things - especially in a highly competitive scenario. To cover your bases, I think it is good advice to focus on spelling. You can fight the system, or just accept that all humans are flawed :)

If your job is HR in Google the correct response is to say "Hey, hiring managers! Here are the things we see you incorrectly identifying as corollaries to competence" not "Hey, prospective employees, here's how to trick our stupid hiring managers".

What I have learnt is that you can't convince someone they're wrong, if what they're doing is working for them and they're seeing results. Like I said, you can fight the system if you want, or just move on to more important things.

The expectation is that you put some care into your resume and pay attention to the details. It's an important document, unlike a HackerNews comment.

If you can't even get the spelling right on a 2-page document, despite the existence of modern spell-checkers, that's a strong signal that you aren't making a serious effort.

It tells me that you didn't bother paying attention to the spellcheck in your writing tool, probably didn't take the time to carefully re-read a document for errors, and likely had no one else look at your resume for feedback.

None of those are things I'm looking for in an engineer on my team. I want an engineer who uses their tools to make their work more efficient, who pays attention to details, and believes feedback is a way to improve the quality of their work.

Source: am a FAANG-adjacent hiring manager.

How many 9's do you expect out of my proof reader. Because that's what is happening at Google. It isn't that people aren't proof reading their CVs, it's that mistakes slip through sometimes, and if you're at Google, receiving thousands of CVs per day that 'sometimes' is all the time. But that doesn't mean you should expect 5 9s out of your candidaes.

You're taking the comparison too literally because writing a resume and writing code both involve text. Having a typo on your resume (not a random internet comment) is a strong signal that you can't be bothered do the bare minimum, which isn't a great trait for any job.

Spell checkers are a solved problem for decades now, there's literally no excuse to leave typos in important documents.

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