Woman recruited by Google four times and rejected, joins age-discrimination suit

They then called me the next day and said "oh, yeah -- we aren't going to give you an offer" and wouldnt give me a reason.

The next time, they attempted to recruit me for the same position and I went through several days of phone interviews passing each one. Then I said -- "so you know, I interviewed for this position before and was told I would get an offer, but then didnt" they went back and checked and then said "Yeah we wont be continuing the interview process"

Then it happened a third time! Finally I sent the recruiter an email that said "This is the third time you have attempted to recruit me for this position -- Either offer me the job, with a salaray of X or take me out of your system and stop calling me"

They haven't called me since -- and I still have no idea why I am blacklisted.

I was contacted three times for the same position, until I also had to tell the recruiter 'no thank you, remove me from all future positions'.

The first time I was scheduled to fly into Seattle, they even asked me what I wanted for lunch! Then 1 week before the flight, they cancelled everything, reason 'none given', just 'we will keep you on file'. A different recruiter contacted me a second time 3 months later, I thought to schedule the Seattle interview, but I was told it was 'a different hiring manager' and I needed to do the phone screens again. So I did, after the phone screens, I was given the canned email 'we cannot extend another interview..'. Then the same recruiter contacts me again a month later to see if I wanted to interview! At which point I just declined.

Not saying you didn't have a bad experience, but it's possible that this kind of attitude didn't help your cause much either...

If only Google themselves knew how far that is from truth.

Now, why they want everyone at a 50K engineer company to be management material...seems ill advised.

AOL's hiring process at the time was similarly dysfunctional. I'd interviewed once a year or two previously, but never heard back (which I didn't realize at the time is now the norm). The only reason I was able to eventually get in was because I had a friend working there who got me past the HR barriers. This friend, who was much more experienced than I was only able to be hired when a technical manager stumbled across his resume. Apparently, he couldn't get past HR either, but when the manager found about my friend his attitude was "Why in the world aren't we interviewing this guy?!" As I said, I got laid off, but my friend is still there.

My experience with some companies has been that hiring is run by HR people who have no idea what they are doing, or whom they are looking for, or how to filter resumes by anything other than keywords (e.g., the proverbial "10 years experience with a two-year-old technology" nonsense) and so the hiring managers often never get a chance to see candidates they would be very interested in.

The only way to "prove" discrimination is to show a pattern of behaviours rather than isolated incidents. That's what lawsuits like this often hinge upon, they will use discovery to primarily prove that discrimination is occurring.

Generally speaking, if well-qualified people are constantly failing your interviews, the problem may not be these well-qualified people and instead might be your interviews ;)

Considering that the typical programming interview in this industry does not involve writing any actual code (no, waving your arms against a whiteboard in a coding-like way doesn't count), I'm generally inclined to believe interviews are more problematic than interviewees.

And now she will never get hired by Google after trying to sue them.

They have extreme prejudice in favor of attributes that do not impact performance.

  So she has good qualifications but poor interview skills.

'Interview skills' is pretty much a euphamism for allowing confidence bias to dominate your interview process.

Why would Google contact anyone multiple times inf there had been any problems before?

Obviously their process must include some sort of returning to potential recruits, or the recruiter just has no data on the previous attempts to recruit her. If it was the case that age was the reason they chose not to hire her, they know damn well not to write that down.

Sure there were a few cases of "oops, didn't realize we interviewed you already" and I'm sure there are cases of "we just don't like you as a person". But I'm pretty sure overall, with Google and most companies, the reason was just "you just weren't good enough compared to our other current candidates." And that's OK.

The fact that they re-interview someone they dismiss is a good thing. The fact that they re-interview N times a person they've dismissed N-1 times is just unfortunate and makes it more visible, but it's not in itself a malevolent thing. Maybe it'd be best if they didn't re-interview at all because it makes them look bad (after all, chances are higher they'll reject you again if they already did). But I guess I prefer the view that they don't want to pass on someone that might have improved, or someone that they might have dismissed for the wrong reasons the first time. And I see that as rather positive.

I personally re-interviewed some people multiple times - and both people I had rejected before and people I had approved but who denied or who got hired but then left and decided to come back. It doesn't struck me as a bad thing to re-assess people based on your current needs and your current workforce. You just have not to be a jerk about it.

I'm sure not everybody shares that view though.