I like the google approach for more senior roles - you interview for 2+ months, get approved, and only then do you actually start to look for an actual role at the company. They invert the job/approval process.
In my case one major red flag was "having to fly somewhere before I have an official offer", and I can only imagine the new zoomer crowd leans much more in that direction. FANG doesn't respect your time or effort at all, they think you should be honored just to be in their presence. That shit doesn't fly anymore.
I told someone who then said "well... that's not the way you get a job!" And I said "but... I didn't want a job. They called me. They wanted a worker, but wouldn't do me the courtesy of basic information before I was to drop whatever I was doing and come running to them on their timetable".
If I weren't busy with the familoids at home I'd love a free plane trip and fancy hotel stay. Er, in non-pandemic times at least
That + never ending pandemic + etc
But also, it's really shitty to fly somewhere only to get rejected. Been there, done that.
It's extremely unhelpful if one company is still in the "screening" phase because they take months to progress, while others are already extending offers. The options then are that you wait and risk letting go of other offers, let go of Google, or join a new company and leave within months. All of these options look terrible to me.
Then the recruiter will help connect you with teams that have open head count. If there's a mutual fit, the company will make a formal offer.
Several companies fight this with a standard interviewing pipeline, of course most candidates will be displeased if they spend 1 month interviewing and then get dropped into a random team.
Just look at what was happening at Cisco with caste based hiring.
You're not interviewed by teams with open headcount. I never met my interviewers again.
Of course it doesn't make any sense for small companies.
Then got and excited call from my recruiter and was told I'd get an offer and that there was a match for one of the teams I interviewed for. The catch? Downleveled to SWE I, despite saying earlier in the process that I would not take it for career development and salary range reasons.
They were willing to set up another round of interviews to get more data, but at some point you just have to call it. End-to-end, this took around a month and a half. This was with my positive references allowing me to skip the phone screen.
I've had positive experiences interviewing with Microsoft and Amazon, no experience with other big tech.
It also has the added benefit of improving internal cooperation, trust, and mobility. Many big companies suffer from the attitude of "Oh, those doofuses in department X can't be trusted to get anything done right". [1] When you have a common hiring process, you know that everybody in the company passed the same bar you and your teammates did, and your baseline assumption should be that they're as competent. And similarly, transfers get pretty easy because everybody has already passed a common hiring bar, so you know that the candidate is already qualified technically, you just need to judge if they're a good fit for your team.
Time to find a mutual fit can vary a lot. It was really quick (like a couple days) my first time around, because I was early enough in my career to be pretty adaptable, had a very in-demand skillset (Javascript), and had multiple teams - Search, GMail, Docs - all vying for me. It was a lot slower (month+) my second time around, because I interviewed in April 2020 as the world was falling apart from COVID and teams kept disappearing as they got canceled or their headcount got cut.
[1] https://i.insider.com/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000000?width=589&for...
You don't really expect any new hire SWE to be able to do the job on day 1 - Google has so much bespoke internal technology that it takes months to become productive. So the fit conversations aren't really just another round of interviews - they are more of a "mutual fit" assessment (interests and background). Often it's more of a sales pitch ("here's why you should join our team").
Do any of the other FAANGs (MAGMAs??) do the same now?
And to answer a question from a neighboring comment, it's exceedingly rare for a match to not happen. There are way more teams with open headcount than candidates looking, so teams and managers go out of their way to woo the incoming folks. I don't know exactly what happens if one spends two months fruitlessly, presumably somebody from the bootcamp program would have a long conversation with them about their general fit at the company.
Ehhhh...you say that, but it definitely goes both ways. It's not meant to, but hiring managers at Meta absolutely do evaluate the bootcampers who reach out to join, especially for more popular teams.