The 'Hire' product just launched today actually came from an acquisition, it was not developed internally by Google at all.
It was developed by Bebop, a company Google acquired last year for $380 Million that was founded by Diane Greene (Founder of VMWare). When Google decided to bring Diane Greene on full time to run Google Cloud, they had to purchase her company in order to facilitate that. Bebop originally had aspirations to shake up the enterprise software space by building a suite of applications, and the 'Hire' app was the first one they produced. Bebop employees have been working on it since then and had a long beta period before the launch today. As noted in the TechCrunch article, the 'Hired' platform also runs the Google for Jobs website that launched earlier this year.
Well, first you sign a multiyear agreement. Lets call it 5 years. Now you only need to find a way to spend $200m a year on a service that purports to discard your videos pretty damn fast.
How do you do that? I figure a mix of bandwidth, storage, and personal targeting ad-tech. Most folks using cloud vendors are upset at the outbound traffic cost, so that probably costs a pretty penny. Especially when CDN and caching layers are pointless.
That's nice, but let's be honest: She is a billionaire, and will continue to make hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars during her future tenure at Google. A person of average means donating $500 may be a bigger personal sacrifice than Greene donating $150M.
I dont know why this is being down-voted. While what she did is great, it is a true point in terms of personal sacrifice.
I saw an interview with Bill Gates where he said much the same thing to a comment about his generosity. He pointed out he doesn't sacrifice a single item/experience he wants in life giving away what he does. And a ordinary person that gives a few hundred gives up more than him in terms of what it costs them.
Its a valid point as long as it doesn't take away from the fact the other is also generous.
As someone who used to give away hundreds when he was on the average wage, no, it didn't really cost me life experiences. When I was on less than the average wage, I never had hundreds to give away, but on the average wage (with no kids), a few hundred didn't make much difference.
Few people giving to charity actually sacrifice their own life experiences to do so. As a result, it seems silly to dismiss philanthropic billionaires. We want more of those, not fewer.
True, but how many humans are able to take that perspective? If history has taught me anything, it's that our desires don't end when they are satisfied.
Me too, almost as if acquiring all that wealth, primarily from corporations then redistribution was not something that was pre-considered, surely he is not that smart ;)
How do you know how much money she has? What is her net worth? She's way below someone like Bill Gates (who could count $150M as disposable at .17% of his net worth), and (unless she's doing some impressive money laundering) is not a billionaire. So even if you say she has $999M, $150M is 15% of her money. Unless someone average has ~$3k to their name, $150M is a lot more to her.
I hear this line of reasoning frequently and have come to agree with it. Is it even really a donation when donating 150 million has zero impact on your quality of life? There should be some self-sacrifice for it to actually be a gesture of goodwill. I don't pat myself on the back for donating excess clothes.
I don't quite understand the idea of tax dodging a smaller tax bill by donating a larger amount of money? She had $150mm in stock, and donated it all, avoiding a tax bill of $30mm? If she had paid the tax bill, she would have had net $120mm, but after donating it, she had net $0mm?
There must be something I'm missing here. I've seen these kinds of schemes discussed before, but don't understand how they would work.
TL;DR It looks like she donated $150MM when in actuality she only donated $37.5MM
Can you imagine the optics of an active board member, of a multi-billion dollar company, profiting from said company -- she's on the board of -- buying the company she runs? Good grief that reeks.
She understood she couldn't take that money in good conscience. So, she got out in front of the optics for a small fee by "donating to charity." (I mean look at the comments here applauding her for donating her shares.)
When you donate $150MM in stock, not only do you dodge the $30MM capital-gains tax (at a 20% tax rate), you receive a tax write-off for the full market value of the stock when you donated: $150MM in this case. Which means, in any year, she can take $150MM in income taxed at say 55%, and pay $0 in taxes on it. Much better than the $82.5MM she'd originally owe. And it makes tax planning a lot easier -- you don't have to worry about timing.
All in all: $120MM net - $82.5MM write-off = $37.5MM total cost to her for shares she didn't even want -- for good reason.
Understand that I don't care. But I would've been more impressed if she had donated those shares to her employees...
> Which means, in any year, she can take $150MM in income taxed at say 55%, and pay $0 in taxes on it.
55% is greater than the maximum combined federal and state marginal income tax rate on normal income, and no one making that much does it as normal (mainly, labor) rather than long-term capital gains (which pays lower rates) income in the first place, because no one pays that kind of money for labor, you only make it by capital returns, so, no, she can't even in principal, and even if the tax rates were such that she could in principal, she still wouldn't be likely to be able to in practice.
Firstly, 55% is not greater than the maximum tax rate one could pay on income (especially in CA) [1].
Secondly, you understand that RSUs (restricted stock units) are taxed as normal W-2 income at the time of vesting, right! You pay capital-gains tax on any appreciation in value after said vesting -- should you choose to sell the stock.
You should probably stop spreading misinformation on topics you don't have experience in.
> Firstly, 55% is not greater than the maximum tax rate one could pay on income
But it is, AFAICT, greater than the maximum marginal income tax rate [0]; since the deduction affects only income taxes and not other taxes on income, it is the maximum marginal income tax rate, not the maximum marginal rate of taxation on income, that is relevant.
> Secondly, you understand that RSUs (restricted stock units) are taxed as normal W-2 income at the time of vesting
Yes, I do. That doesn't change anything I said. People that are making hundreds of millions of dollars of income in a year aren't making it from RSU vesting, or any other source of income subject to regular income taxes.
[0] just barely; the maximum marginal income tax rate in any US jurisdiction seems to be 39.6% federal + 13.3% CA state + 1.5% SF local, or 54.4%.
Uhm, they do make significant (>$40MM) amounts of money from cash+RSU compensation. [1-5] That's literally what you can find with a cursory search; no digging. Furthermore, the tax writeoff carries through 5 years since it was a stock donation.
And sure, use 54.4% instead of 55%. Don't miss the forest for the trees though.
Certainly it was better optics for her to donate the stock to charity, but she didn't come out ahead from it AFAICT.
A simplified example, assuming one year of income from the shares, and one year of $150mm income from Google.
### Keep the shares:
Year1 = $150 - ($150 * 0.2) => $120
Year2 = $150 - ($150 * 0.55) => $67.5
Year1 + Year2 => $187.5
### Donate the shares:
Year1 = $150 - $150 - $0 => $0
Year2 = $150 - $0 => $150
Year1 + Year2 => $150
The first law of tax is that it is always better to have more money than less money. I could be wrong here, but I can't seem to find a way that you come out with more money by giving it away (ignoring donations to your own dodgy charity). I'm a big proponent of charity giving, but I don't see a way to make it turn a profit.
Did you read my reply? You've arrived at the same number I posted in my TL;DR... $37.5MM.
The point was never for her to come out ahead, just less behind.
Why does this matter?
I was simply pointing out that she achieved exactly what she wanted. Better optics. :)
People commending her and commenting how amazing, how selfless, how fantastic it is that she donated all her proceeds to charity.
Understand that her primary motivation in donating was the write-off, not charity.
Otherwise, if she was feeling so chummy, why didn't she instead divide her almost 50% share among the employees that helped build her company? Hint: there's no write-off for that.
It really ought not to be though. I get that the reality is that it is but it irks me greatly that we don't simply tax more heavily and have a social system which works to solve the types of problems that charities aim to solve. Then if you wanted to do "charity work" you'd just work for the government.
I think it does not work for the same reason Soviet-style government-planned economy does not work. The incentives of private persons and of government officials are unreconcilably different.
My company makes recruiting software and it we knew it was only a matter of time (a couple of years ago... now its obvious) before Google would enter the recruiting industry.
Particularly because the major players other than LinkedIn basically rely entirely on Google. All Indeed, Monster, CareerBuilder do is buy Google Ads and then essentially resells the marketing. This is similar to the situation TripAdvisor is in but generally worse.
The current job boards / job aggregators (the companies above) are terribly unimaginative, generally not helpful and often price gouge companies (if you wondering the what the difference is between aggregator and job board... there really isn't much but one pulls the jobs aka crawls the web for them).
Now the boards/aggregators are trying to become more service based and offer higher value offerings for long term strategic reasons. Indeed is rolling out "Indeed Prime" and I believe Career Builder is offering something similar as well.
So as creepy as it is that Google is in the recruiting space I am optimistic that will finally provide some spark of innovation that is much needed in a very high touch industry devoid of it.
Honestly the work to be done in search in general is still gigantic, and it's even bigger in job.
Despite having tons of stores of all sorts (app stores by microsoft apple and google, movies streaming stores like netflix, game stores like steam, ...) no one has truly found a way to solve the discoverability problem that feels really satisfying.
Some are decent, but that's mostly by sending you so many stuff at once that a few are bound to be acceptable, but that doesn't mean they were the best choices for you (eg you buy that game or look that movie, but there are other stuff you would have taken over it if the store had been able to identify them).
Job/recruiting is even harder in that it's a two way attraction, the employee need to convince you but you need to convince them back. Result being, we self impose the same "spam" of propositions by seeing tons of candidate / interviewing in tons of companies, wasting a lot of people time (let's face it, in a big share of interviews either if not both of the parties knows it won't fit after just a couple of minutes).
I have no doubt that companies who are not merely looking for marketing / reselling gimmick have a share of that space to own, Google or not.
> Honestly the work to be done in search in general is still gigantic, and it's even bigger in job.
I completely agree! After all I'm basically admitting that what my company does (albeit we make company job portals and job marketing tools) is devoid of imagination :) .
But this in part because it is so high touch and is actually a really really hard problem.
I just don't get how this is considered "normal" - they create the ecosystem, let it thrive with the content users generate, and after some category/apps reach a certain interesting threshold, Google gathers all the data they have access to and use their massive distribution system to deploy their version built on the back of their userbase.
I think it's dangerous, in all honesty. The same goes for Apple/Facebook/Amazon. If they build an ecosystem they shouldn't be able to take advantage of it to build and deploy products.
This is not the same (boards/aggregators) as Yelp, HN, Reddit, Stackoverflow or various other user generated content review sites.
This is because most if not all the jobs come from the companies website. They are a search middleman similar to how Google is for almost everything else. They don't provide an ecosystem like say HN, Stackoverflow, Yelp, etc. In some ways they steal the content.
Sites like Indeed are basically doing the same thing that Google really should have been doing.
Now the boards/aggregators tried to provide "ecosystems" but they could never get it right because when people are looking for the job they are desperate and just don't give a... (or at least that is my theory. its also why linkedin works because its is passive).
I have noticed through our metrics (and I'm biased because we make job web sites for companies that hire) that the best candidates (despite what Indeed says) come from going directly to your website or come from LinkedIn (assuming non referral based).
If you are wondering how then Indeed/Career Builder et al do so well its that its hard to measure actual success (ie source to hire). It should be easy but sadly its not (don't have time for the details).
So what these guys provide is ton of traffic with lots of noise. Traffic that google could have easily provided.
The big companies post all of their jobs on their website, but the smaller companies definitely do not. In developing countries it is even worse. In India it is common for jobs to be posted on a website as PDFs, which are scan/images of printed pages.
There is added value. Indeed, and plenty of other job sites, have done things like quick apply which bypasses the horrific process of legacy ATSs like Oracle's Taleo.
People, in the most general sense, should be extremely concerned if Google -- or any specific company -- gains a market hold on job search / recruiting.
If, say Google and Facebook, or Google and LinkedIn had control of 90% of the hiring vertical they could, in effect, take a large chunk of an employee earnings. How? Employers would have to spend a lot of money just for the employee to know some opportunity exists for them. Big, high margin, corporations would be just fine. Small businesses would be disadvantaged.
This is what has happened with the travel aggregators. Two companies dominate (and own all of the other travel search engines you think are independent.) The big hotel chains can negotiate slightly better deals, the small ones pay full price for visibility.
In a more narrow definition we can see this with on demand work start ups. Uber, Postmates, and others have spend massive amounts of money to recruit workers. Of course as start ups they have time constraints and geography constraints. They need to grow really fast so they pay tens of millions of dollars on buying search ads, display ads, and so on. Perhaps they could grow organically but it would be hard.
A good job search / recommendation would just show users the best economic opportunities for them at this moment. Yes, it would be hard to rank and filter out stuff that looks good but is crap (Maybe Uber falls in the crap category?) However, if someone wants to work, certainly they shouldn't be sitting at home idle because a potential employer didn't spend millions of dollars on an ad campaign. (Those "reach" dollars should be going to workers, not platforms.)
(re: travel aggregators) Isn't one of those companies ITA software which was bought by Google a couple of years ago? Which is the other one: Expedia or Priceline? What about CheapOair? Hipmunk?
I had heard a while back (from a startup client I did some consulting work for (built and delivered a prototype), and who was in the HR/Job web app space), that Indeed.com was bought for ~$1bn by Recruiter.com . I wonder if they made money back on that buy.
I have mixed views about this. I see your point that its definitely an unfair advantage to Google since its the default search engine and can gather so much data. But the existing job sites (indeed, for example) have done a piss poor job so far. I guess what I'm saying is: I would have been a lot more concerned if Indeed was amazing and Google stepped in specifically to destroy it before it got too big (like MS did with IE and Netscape).
The thing is - and Peter Thiel actually makes a good point about this in Zero To One, when it comes to monopoly's - a monopoly is healthy as long as it invests into technology development, because they have the financial muscle to do it.
This kind of development is a vertical leap? I don't see it like such... just like I don't see it when Amazon brings their branded products to category's that are doing well.
I don't say Google, Amazon, don't invest in proper tech development - but this kind of development is just to establish themselves deeply at the cost of their user base.
I feel split in this subject honestly - on one side, why can't they leverage something of their own? On the other hand, that's when things start to get shady.
I work in this space as well and can say that Google just making noises about entering the market as aided in bringing renewed interest (and investment) in developing better tech from the established companies.
> That is true of Indeed, but true neither of Monster nor CareerBuilder. CareerBuilder sell a lot of HR software, as well.
Actually they all sell additional HR software (I know this intimately well but unfortunately I can't legally go into the details) but just like Google they make most of their money by selling advertising space.
> Generally one pays for the latter and not the former, in fact.
Originally aggregators were like that but Indeed changed that later on. Actually the major difference (and I didn't want to go into it before) is the pricing model. Aggregators charge similar to how Google does.
They have promoted search results and charge based on impressions/clicks.
Job Boards charge like traditional advertising. A flat fee for placement for a certain amount of time.
One thing is for sure none of them provide things for free. The free job postings on Indeed is on the way out (I mean it will always be there but its not how they make money nor does it work that well).
(as a friendly note I recall people do not like when you use the code feature (ie space indentation) for quoting comments.. I don't mind though)
In positive news, it'll probably be only a couple of years until Google gets bored of being in that space and either shutters the product or spins it off to an independent company.
Both from the outside looking in, and from discussions with people who have worked in Google, the overwhelming impression I get is that anywhere outside of a few key areas, it's mostly a bunch of geeks playing with something until they get bored.
makes me think of the AmazonBasics strategy of monitoring best selling/popular products they're able to measure on their platform and then swoop in on the action.
Come to think of it I wonder if LinkedIn etc swoop in on the engaging talent as well before the recruiting companies catch wind of them.
I for one, will never use a Google product again. They level of creepiness and data they have on all their users is insane.
I personally have switched to DuckDuckGo, Fastmail, FireFox (the mobile browser is awesome btw), and will replace Android as soon as a viable alternative is presented. Smooth sailing.
The problem with Google, is they are building a repository for themselves, but also for government. Couple that with their willingness to kill products, and you'd have to be insane to trust their services.
> and will replace Android as soon as a viable alternative is presented
One alternative that's been around for a while you might like if you want to continue using smart mobile devices is an operating system made by Apple (not Google), called iOS (used to be called iPhone OS but it can now be used on tablets too even some music players like iPods have it).
Just throwing that out there, they have a lot of similar features, but with iOS you don't need to get involved with Google. Check it out, it's definitely a viable alternative.
The OP seems concerned about privacy. Apple certainly has a lot of PR activity promoting privacy of their products.
But at the same time it seems so many websites, apps, companies, ISPs, etc. are hoping to track their users much more than before. Perhaps even sell profiles on their users to advertisers or other tech companies.
Apple also seems to be a fairly secretive company. Their products have historically felt more "closed" than Android. Isn't Apple violating user privacy in iOS just like Android? And if they aren't, shouldn't they be, from a business perspective?
The OP can upgrade from iOS whenever the appropriately Free/Libre mobile operating system is viable.
iOS, despite being a very closed ecosystem, is much more privacy-conscious. In addition to being much more resistant to law enforcement and criminal adversaries, it submits far less information about the user to Apple by default.
To be fair to the Android team, almost all of the user tracking and advertisement targeting can be disabled in the system and account preferences. Sure, Google could disregard the user preferences, but that might open up liability for fraud.
> Isn't Apple violating user privacy in iOS just like Android?
Doesn't seem that way. Consider the flak Apple took for standing up for users' rights with the whole Bernardino incident.
And here's a specific example I read about a while ago. When you're using Google Maps, your device is directly identifiable in Google's servers all the time by a unique identification token. When using Apple Maps, your iPhone generates a new token every ~15 minutes and uses that to report position. There is no connection between any two tokens other than location proximity, making it much more difficult to track users directly from Apple's end. (I'd give a source but I'm on mobile, but I think I read about it on Apple's website around a year ago.)
> And if they aren't, shouldn't they be, from a business perspective?
Well, if their business was selling customer data then yeah. But their business is selling cool devices with cool software. Yes, collecting all that data would make some things a lot easier — ever wonder why Siri doesn't work as well as Google Assistant for a lot of people? — but Apple appears to care about privacy and security enough that they don't engage in these tactics. And... they seem to be doing okay despite it, so I don't think they mind the hit to their piggy banks.
>ever wonder why Siri doesn't work as well as Google Assistant for a lot of people?
You have some valid points on your post, but praising the inferiority of software based on perceived limitations of increased security focus seems like Apple cult-of-personality type stuff.
It's an established fact that Apple has traditionally refused to just use all of their user recordings as training data, and is willing to accept worse voice recognition as a result.
I'm not sure I exactly follow, but anyway it's easy to find comments online from people who've worked at Apple recently who talk about how this is actually a logistical problem. Apple can't just throw data at their issues until things work like e.g. Google can, specifically because they do not collect as much data in the first place.
They're the privacy option because the data they collect is heavily restricted. Consider my earlier example of the navigation identification tokens — Apple has a similar "amount" of data, but it's significantly less useful in its raw form than Google's. But Apple makes the choice to collect data in that way because it helps protect users' privacy.
>We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you.
Apple also sucks at using user data to make better products compared to Google, so it's perfect for them to claim concern for privacy as a business strategy.
iOS is better for privacy (Apple is more inept at cloud stuff than Google) but much, much worse for freedom. I don't want a device that I'll have to get Apple's permission to install stuff on.
Without GApps / Play Services, I'm wondering just how helpful an Android device would be for the typical techy on the go.
Sure, I could text, check email, use open source maps, check my account balances, and play some simple games.
But I've learned both from my BlackBerry which had Android emulation and Kindle Tablet, both of which can't use apps that depend on Google's APIs, a lot of pretty important apps won't work: any maps that show traffic or turn by turn directions, Uber / Lyft, almost all popular social apps like Twitter, Facebook, most popular games, payment apps, dating apps, streaming music, etc.
That's a big loss. Not sure I want to go back to the days of my old Nokia smart phone with Symbian apps or even BlackBerry QNX which had a decent browser.
I suppose it is, taking into account the GP said there's no "viable alternative" to Android... but iOS exists, and it's not only a viable alternative, but much better than Android in lots of ways.
The GP said they "will replace Android as soon as a viable alternative is presented." This strongly implies iOS is not a viable alternative generally, rather than for them specifically. It read like a cheap potshot at iOS.
The only sad things I use more Google products on my iPhone than Apple ones, notably Google Photos and Chrome. I'd never switch though as I have never had a pleasant experience using Android.
It is certainly annoying with how they try and nudge other products away in subtle ways.
Like like Firefox on Android, works really well. However on Google's search, they give you a stripped down version of their search results inferior to what Chrome gets.
It's similar speeds though I've got 4G or good Wifi.
But what you miss out on is the top cards.
Like if you search for Weather, you can see what's the predicted forecast per hour.
Or when you search for translate, you get a translate widget at the top.
And for image search, it does the old page-by-page view versus infinite scrolling which isn't too bad. But the image quality is really low.
Is it possible they rolled out a "Chrome" and an "everyone else" option since some options like cards are only tested by Google on Chrome, and that's why it shows up as such?
Well they give the chrome site to Safari on iPhone OS.
So possibly but this is the company that is all about web standards, right?
At least I'm sure that what someone working on Chromium/Chrome/Angular/etc would say.
Safari and Chrome are using the same basic webkit rendering engine with minimal mutations from each other.
Firefox's engine is different and makes many different decisions with regards to implementation detail. Since the web standards rarely constrain things like, say, time to complete a reflow step in mutating a page when a DOM element has its visibility property changed, standards-compliant browsers can make different decisions on these bits of detail that lead to practically very different experiences.
In general, if it works on Chrome it'll probably work on Safari, and it is not guaranteed to work on Firefox, IE, or Edge without further testing.
Obvious problems goes unnoticed: search results page kept burning cpu if I keet it open in desktop Firefox. (Installed an extension to fix it and haven't tested lately.)
It's hard to belive this can happen without anyone caring at such a big place.
At a company that seems to be attracting the best and brightest it is really hard to belive this isn't intentional.
So now assume they test and find it doesn't work on mobile Firefox. What should they do? Refrain from rolling out the design to Chrome and Safari until Firefox performance catches up, or roll out the functionality differently on different browsers?
Sounds like, based on the descriptions here, they're doing the latter, right? Infinite scrolling on Chrome vs. paged viewing on Firefox, for instance.
Maybe FF just isn't a very good browser? You can be standards-compliant while implementing the standards with performance problems and ugly corner-cases.
I say they are applying an Microsoft vs Opera here and I wish EU will take a closer look at them soon.
IMO basic cross-browser compability is something that everyone but the most cash-strapped or pre-beta software should apply for as long as it is publicly available at least.
And for google who earns more than they know what do do with I'd say it is an embarrassingly easy-to-see-through anti-competitive behaviour.
It's easy to critique them for being too big, but what solution do you have? Would you propose that they just... stop scaling? Stop making new products?
I realize that they are really big, and with more products, they get more data, but imagine for one second that your goal truly was to help customers and provide them with as many useful tools as possible, what options would you have?
You either make more products that helps people (and end up getting more data), or you don't, stay stale, and end up going down like Yahoo or many other company who don't evolve do.
I am a gmail/drive/cal user primarily. I find their services fast, reliable, secure and integrated to a lot of other services.
Sure, they collect and sell my browsing data. But so what? It costs me nothing, doesn't impact my experience (outside of the occasionally annoying ad), and provides them revenue to keep innovating.
I don't really understand the anti-google sentiment that's been brewing lately. Why not the same aversion to apple, microsoft, and amazon? Or is it just flavor of the month?
Personally I'd much rather use Hire over LinkedIn. But I guess it's just one devil for another.
It's not about being big. It's about the fact that every product they release is deliberately designed to siphon more data off their users. Everything's stored server-side, everything's identifiable, everything's quid-pro-quo where the service is crippled without your data.
A prime example is the way they now channel so much of Android's data through Google Play Services. The updated permissions model is great if you want to stop third parties creeping on you, but with everything going through Google Play Services, your phone can only give you data if that data first goes to Google. If you don't permit Google Play Services to access your location, not only does Maps pettily default you to the wrong continent but even the Gmail app scolds you for having location data turned off.
Don't conflate 'deliberately invasive' with 'big'.
It's in corporations' nature to grow, just like Microsoft did in its antitrust days, and Google (and Amazon and others) are now. It can be dangerous.
I don't expect corporations to stop growing by themselves. But consumers can use alternative products, and tech workers can prefer to work at other companies. We can limit the danger that way.
It is about the integrated experience. Most big companies I know of actually hire recruiting co-ordinators for scheduling and following up with potential candidates as well as with interviewers internally. If Google can use their G-Suite products including Gmail, Calendar, Docs etc. to provide a seamless recruiting experience, I would give it a shot - especially if my company is already on G Suite.
Now that Google has the building blocks for businesses - Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Video Conferencing etc. - it makes sense for them to get into common enterprise services. This ways they can extract more rent and also provide an integrated/more valuable experience to their customers.
I can see the n-gate summary now: "Google finds another way to make money by spying on people. Hackernews ignores the article and instead settles in for a good old iPhone vs Android debate."
It's not marketing - Apple goes out of their way to build privacy into their products. For example, the way that Apple Maps has no persistent user identifier and prevents Apple from knowing your location history.
Regarding ad-blocking VPNs, I can see why one might be sad to lose these and disagree with Apple's move here. But it's not a privacy decision - it's an ad-blocking decision. VPNs actually focused on privacy, like privateinternetaccess, aren't being removed from the App Store.
I fully agree, but I just could not get used to DuckDuckGo. It just pales in comparison to Google Search somehow, but I find it difficult to explain why. The same applies to Firefox, I really tried, but especially the extension ecosystem in Chrome is more mature. For example, Lastpass works much better in Chrome than Firefox.
Considering this, I switched to Fastmail and removed my Google account from all my browsers. I created a dummy Google account that I only use to set my home address (again, too handy) and to be able to set preferences and have a Chrome profile.
Funny because AMP was exactly the reason why I switched to DuckDuckGo (although https://encrypted.google.com is also a viable option).
One more thing to remember - Firefox for Android has AdBlock extensions (e.g uBlock). My personal experience with mobile ads is best described as vibrating, redirecting scams that just drove me nuts.
For the lazy:
---
2008: DuckDuckGo was founded[15] by Gabriel Weinberg,[16][17] an entrepreneur whose previous venture, The Names Database, was acquired by United Online in 2006 for $10 million.
This is most relevant snippet I could find about DDG's founder.
The few times I needed help with my project Fi connection it took about 3 minutes to reach a human. Even faster if I was willing to chat instead of call.
I completely disagree. Recently did a factory reset on my nexus only to find out that without the password for the last sync'd google account, a throwaway I don't remember, it's bricked. I can report it stolen on the device page, can easily prove to google it's my device, but I can't reset or sell or do anything with the phone. Google's response after spending days trying to fix, and talking to different support people who had wildly different answers, the only viable answer was to give me the number for Lg and wish me good luck. Never have I paid so much for a product which is broken by its own design while being entirely unsupported by the vendor. Never will I purchase a google product or service and I will tell everyone I know to do the same.
That's because, short of sending you a new device, there isn't any way to bypass the theft prevention. Do you have the same complaint about, as another user mentioned, not being able to recover your data when you forget the password to an encrypted drive?
Do you have the same complaint about, as another user mentioned, not being able to recover your data when you forget the password to an encrypted drive?
This is a pretty disingenuous analogy. GP did not ask about recovering data from the device. GP asked about starting over from scratch. Most people do have the expectation that an old encrypted drive can be reformatted and repurposed without knowing the key.
True, but in this case, you're "encrypting" (or really, securing) your device, and not your data. (I realize this will be misunderstood because "encrypting your device" normally means encrypting the data on your device).
The whole point of that is as an anti-theft measure (a stolen device [with a locked bootloader] cannot be factory reset without the original owner's permission). It would be kind of silly if you could bypass that by saying "no look, its mine I just forgot the password.".
Now admittedly, I'm unsure if you need to know the original password, or if you can change the password online and then reset it, but I think the second would work.
As an aside, this I think fits into a trope I see repeatedly (and pretty much only on HN). I'm not making any judgement about whether being privacy conscious is good or bad. But I find it amusing when people state something like "This product is awful because I <did something that is incredibly privacy conscious and actively inhibits the ability of the prodcut to track things about me that contribute to a positive UX> and then <some product was not useful, and my experience was notably less good than other people>."
>cannot be factory reset without the original owner's permission)
Presumably the permission should come _before_ the reset? After the reset, all the data is gone anyway, and asking the password at that point seems pointless since
> I <did something that is incredibly privacy conscious and actively inhibits the ability of the prodcut to track things about me that contribute to a positive UX>
I read it as - "I did a completely normal thing like performing a factory reset of a consumer device (something that people have been doing for over a decade)"
>Presumably the permission should come _before_ the reset? After the reset, all the data is gone anyway, and asking the password at that point seems pointless since
The point, in this case, is not to keep the data secure, but to disincentivise theft of the device. You cannot resell a phone that prevents someone from using the device.
>I read it as - "I did a completely normal thing like performing a factory reset of a consumer device (something that people have been doing for over a decade)"
To be clear, doing a factory reset wasn't the privacy-conscious thing. Using a throwaway google account to set up the device was. The flow in this case is that the phone will say something like "please enter the username and password of the old account on this device before logging in with a new user account." If they knew the password to their old account, there wouldn't be any issue.
I factory reset devices fairly often and so I run into this a lot, and its not an issue because I know the password to the google account that I use.
I fully accept the premise that a theft prevention system will limit the users ability to do certain tasks. My point was that this feature should also have blocked the factory reset from happening in the first place. That way, your data is still there, but access is conditional on you having the right keys, and there are no surprises.
>I fully accept the premise that a theft prevention system will limit the users ability to do certain tasks. My point was that this feature should also have blocked the factory reset from happening in the first place.
It doesn't sound like that would have made any difference here (ie. instead of "I have a phone I can't use" the complain would be "I can't remove this old google account from my phone")
And actually, as an anti-theft tool, you don't want that, since you want to be able to remotely factory reset your device in case it is stolen (ie. the find my phone features).
Someone at LG or Qualcomm can definitely fix this easily and it takes about 30 seconds to do so. All it takes is to do a "chip erase" which will clear the QSEE sector and allow a complete factory reset.
Even without reading the article, this is what I came to add. Now they have a service of this nature, the need and urgency of saying goodbye to Google has increased tremedously.
Perhaps because they discovered it on TC and wanted to give them the due credit. Or perhaps they felt the editorial content added value to their understanding or context.
What I'd really like to see is a database of information about employers that's not readily available until you become an employee, like non-compete agreements, intellectual property assignments, etc.
If you've quit your job, sold your house / given up your apartment, moved all your stuff to a new city, then on your first day at your new job they hand you a stack of documents to sign including some (like non-compete agreements) that would have significantly influenced your decision to accept the job offer, then the employer has a great deal of leverage to get you to sign those documents.
It would be nice if this kind of information were more readily available in advance to people considering job offers.
Glassdoor.com is about the closest to that. At least you can get a high level feel on whether the company is a dumpster fire or not.
So the trick with that idea, and I think it's a valuable one, is how to monetize it. Companies that do recruiting are paid by the companies. Who would pay the companies that work for the developer / contractor?
Ooof, I've always had the privilege of getting these up front with my offer. I don't think I'd agree to an offer without knowing what all of these were up front.
My first internship actually provided an IP agreement upfront.
Ever since then, I've told companies that in order to consider their offer, I also need details about their benefits and copies of anything that I would need to sign as a condition of my employment.
I haven't had that many jobs, but so far no one has said no.
Once I realized how toxic some companies NDAs are (1), I ask for them once I get an offer letter. Given the severity of their terms, it would be highly harmful to sign an offer letter without seeing all of the employment terms and conditions up front.
1: One small company that threw one of these at me three months into my employment nearly caused me to quit. Its NDA forbade me from working for 1 year for any employer that engaged in any metrics-related work - I will let you savor the broad toxicity of that statement. I objected strenuously and was able to get an adjustment to the terms.
I was just about to select a recruitment management service. Both Lever and Greenhouse has "call us" pricing, and sadly Google Hire follows the same trend. Only Workable has a clear pricing page, which gives them a big plus in my book. Since we're on G Suite, Hire could be a natural fit but the requirement to book a demo (and the accompanying upside-down shaking to see how much money falls out of our pockets) is a big turn-off.
Would love to hear experiences from someone who has for example tried both Workable and Lever.
It's a slick web application along the lines of the fanciness of Asana's interface.
What it isn't is a sane applicant tracking system. It doesn't reliably notify you when candidates apply. It supports virtually zero job board integrations. It very much wants you to adapt to it, with very little support for the other way around. The interface is over-complicated to the point of being unusable for anyone who isn't committed to spending hours a week in it.
I have never used an ATS that I actually liked, but the failings of Lever make it pretty special in terms of ATS hatred.
It isn't particularly expensive though, despite their opaque pricing. Most ATSes seem to price ~10 open reqs around $300/mo or so. Where the real expense comes in is usually the job board listing fees -- but since Lever barely supports any job boards, you don't have to worry about that!
And to be honest I have always been very turned off by their boastful "We only hire 50/50 Male/Female developer team." It's so in your face, it's like "why not hire the best person for the job?" Or when I see their internal job ads here, its like "Gee, I wonder if this is for a Male engineering role or a Female engineering role," or "Hope they didn't hire a bunch of dudes last week."
So for a variety of reasons I am an anti-advocate for Lever; I will never have business with them and I have successfully pointed several companies to better ATS.
What's wrong with a company stating its mission to hire a diverse workforce? It's pretty hard to hire for diversity, especially if you're not explicit about it.
Who says they aren't hiring quality candidates? Saying you are maintaining a 50:50 team just means you continue searching for a qualified man or woman to maintain the ratio instead of settling for someone overrepresented in the industry.
If you're passing up a quality candidate b/c they're the wrong gender than that's discriminatory. Also, there are plenty of industries that are over represented by women. Do you hear men crying about it or big movements to invade those industries by men. I think the workforce should represent the proper ratio, meaning... if software dev is made up of 90% males and 10% females than so too should the staff. Well the goal should be to make sure your staff make up is in the same ratio. Thats a good goal.
"It doesn't reliably notify you when candidates apply." I get e-mailed every time candidates apply for a role I'm following.
I actually disagree with most of what you're writing and I've been on it nearly full-time for the past few months. Lever has been awesome, coming from Greenhouse. It's also a much newer product, so as another commenter pointed out, it sounds like you missed some of the features that might have been more recently added.
It does notify by e-mail, sometimes to some people. I am a 'Follower' on every currently open job req, and a 'Hiring manager' on a few of the reqs. I'm not a 'posting owner' on any of the current reqs. There are 13 open applicants today, and I received e-mail notifications for zero of them.
This has been a recurring, long term problem with Lever -- and my company has used it for 3+ years (and still does, although we are finally transitioning off). It's to the point where it's someone's job to log into Lever every 2-3 days and nag hiring managers to respond to applicants -- and the hiring managers almost never know that they have applicants based solely on Lever.
Lever's preferred use case is also to have full access to Google Apps e-mail accounts, to provide end-to-end e-mail capture for when you talk to candidates. In theory maybe I want that behavior, but I really don't want to grant that control.
I'm glad that Lever works for you, but it really doesn't work for me. Using it is honestly one of the biggest mistakes we made as a company, and it's irrational that we stuck with it for so long (out of a sense that all ATSes suck so what's the point). It's never worked well for us, and it is fundamentally not the right product fit for us. I'm surprised to hear that it is the right fit for anyone, but it sounds like you have had a very different experience with it.
For my company, I can say with certainty that we have missed out on candidates, had an overall harder time in the hiring process, and had a MUCH harder time sourcing candidates due to its poor job board integration. That said, if you like Lever, don't let me stop you from continuing to like and use it.
We moved to JobScore based on a recruiter recommendation. I wouldn't say that I love it, but it does reliably notify hiring managers and it has a humongous list of job boards that it integrates with.
The web UI is a bit old fashioned, and there's less functionality in some respects, but I find it easier to accomplish the basic tasks in. Really the only thing that I miss from Lever is the ability to go directly from one candidate to the next.
As a developer who gives interviews, I enjoy using Lever. It's very easy to use for getting information on candidates and providing feedback on interview performance.
I haven't heard any complaints from the recruiting team either, so it seems to work at least reasonably well for them too.
They might not have integrations with other job boards, but as someone interviewing, I prefer that since Lever had the best application interfaces of any job application site.
Here is the job board integration from Lever [1], taken directly from my Lever account.
Here is the job board integration from JobScore [2][3][4], taken directly from my JobScore account. I wouldn't say that JobScore is necessarily all that great either, but it does certain basic things that Lever has punted on.
And yes, that's right. It took me 3 screenshots to fit all of the JobScore integrations in.
Granted, Lever does have a lot more sourcing firm integrations, but that isn't my use case and it doesn't provide value to me.
We've tried both greenhouse and lever, using greenhouse now, both were in the $300-$500/mo for the company, no limits on team size or number of job listings as far as I can remember. Honestly I was expecting much more for call us pricing. (We're a 50 person company, were probably ~35 when we started using applicant tracking systems)
Appreciate your feedback! As you've discovered, many B2B companies that primarily sell via inside or field sales do not post their pricing directly. Reserving the conversation around pricing until after you are in contact with a sales person is often helpful, because these products do have very different capabilities. We provide a consultative sales approach, listening carefully to what a prospect is looking to achieve with their talent acquisition strategy.
Lever's products are different. We believe that in order predictably master your hiring goals, you must go beyond applicants and get in front of the best candidates for your company. You must go outbound with referrals, sourcing, and more—speaking to the people that are the very best fit for your team's needs. Applicants are a vital piece of the puzzle, and Lever absolutely provides all of the features that applicant focused products provide. However, those features are seamlessly integrated into Lever Hire, which is a full CRM for job candidates + an applicant tracking system.
"Reserving the conversation around pricing until after you are in contact with a sales person is often helpful" -> such a BS. Everyone in the world knows the reason behind that is charging differently for the same product according to a given company budget.
"Reserving the conversation around pricing until after you are in contact with a sales person is often helpful, because these products do have very different capabilities."
Which you can easily list, with the prices next to them.
Look, I have never, ever, ever found it more helpful to talk to a sales person than to see an actual price sheet. Never. If I don't like the price, but it's just outside my budget, I can call you and see what you can do. If it's so far outside of my budget, then talking to you is a waste of both your time and mine.
You know far more about your needs and are able to evaluate how well software would solve them, and the salespeople you've talked to haven't been worth the time....and that's not normal.
You'd be shocked how bad most people are at evaluating software, especially when it's highly technical. Most people don't even know what a reasonable budget is, what their biggest problems are, what would fix them, and what software is actually doing -- so they rely on cheap self-service products or just take marketing speak at face-value and hope for the best.
And a good salesperson is worth their weight in gold. If you're one of those buyers, salespeople should be much closer to an interviewer or consultant for them: approaching sales calls like research to uncover needs you didn't know you had, introducing you to best practices, and tailoring advice to your specific situation. Their goal is to find a mutual fit and stand by the quality of their solution (and should recommend competitors' products if you wouldn't be happy with it)
> And a good salesperson is worth their weight in gold.
Yes, they absolutely are, for both the client and the company. But you have no way of knowing if $randomNewSaas you're looking at has good sales staff or not. A bad sales guy can screw both. Recently we've had an experience with one Name Brand Vendor where the sales guy is promising things that the company doesn't really deliver; for example, we purchased an old bundle at his suggestion and then get sent automated demands to reduce our capacity because we're in excess of what we pay for (even though it's within the capacity of the old bundle).
Good sales staff are excellent value-adders, but far from all sales staff are good.
Used Workable, Greenhouse and Lever extensively over the past few years and my recommendation would definitely depend on the size of your company. If you're fewer than 200 people, then I categorically recommend Workable. Anything larger and Greenhouse tends to edge it for me. Lever is pretty awful regardless to be honest.
I'm pretty sure Lever and Greenhouse have price gouged in the past (anchored against the price of hiring expensive developers), so I've basically stayed away from them. It's ridiculous to spend thousands of dollars for an ATS, especially if your hiring needs fluctuate (which many do). Workable is honestly great. Super simple and straight forward pricing. Couldn't recommend it more and have it used in two separate places.
I use Workable (about 50 people in our company) and it isn't perfect, but it is very good compared to the competition. Support is responsive as well. It isn't cripplingly expensive. Overall I'd recommend it.
Does anybody in this thread have more information about Google Hire's pricing? I emailed Google twice, and they weren't willing to share it so far ("attend this webinar to learn more").
This product is built by the team that joined through bebop, a $380M acquisition which came with Diane Greene, who now heads Google Cloud (Chief of Cloud), and Bogomil Balkansky who now heads Hired (VP).
Small clarification in case it confused anyone else: Bogomil Balkansky heads the OP Google product, `Hire`, not the unrelated recruiting company `Hired`.
A question I've always wondered -- If Google, or an employee at Google, used ML (or just classic techniques) to analyze the enormous, enormous troves of trojan horse data they have on the employees of virtually every organization across the globe, would it be illegal if they traded on that data? They could surely accurately call virtually any trend before anyone. They could see when morale at a firm drops, when hours drop, when employees start trying to get jobs elsewhere, etc. It is simply shocking the amount of data they have coalesced.
And while I generally have a good opinion on them, a product like this just seems like a step too far and risks threatening the trust users have in them.
IANAL, but I think they would possibly be in breach of their own privacy policy:
> How we use information we collect
> We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads.
[...]
> We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.
I don't think trading for profit on information a user would reasonably expect to be private (search history, browsing history, email) could reasonably be construed to fall into any of those categories, however the definition of "services" in "develop new [services]" is a bit of a joker. Google Hedge Fund anyone?
It sounds like the kind of thing that would cause an existential crisis to the G Suite unit ($1B+ annual revenue) when discovered or leaked. This would have follow-on effects to other Google brands. Also massive liability for breach of contract or even perhaps fraud.
In the G Suite contract, do customers indemnify Google from damages above a certain amount for privacy breaches? I haven't seen the T&Cs, just the privacy policy.
That's basically my rationale for trusting Google with my data: They have both the means (lots of well paid smart people) and the interest (a substantial leak/misuse of my data could well be a fatal event for Google) to take care of it.
> In the G Suite contract, do customers indemnify Google from damages above a certain amount for privacy breaches?
Right. But as a nefarious employee, that's Google's problem. By the time it comes to light, I'm already off laying on a beach in a country without an extradition treaty.
Google does not use corporate customer's data for any type of commercial use, it's only used for the customer's own use.
As such, they do not have "enormous troves of trojan horse data" as they are not allowed (by their own terms) to use it for anything unrelated to the company itself.
I said nothing about corporate customers. I'm talking about individual accounts, and individual devices. Google knows where I go, who I talk to, how long I'm at places, how long I spend in the office, and on, and on, and on. And at an aggregate, they know how busy every shop is, the types of people that visit, etc. They're quite forthright about this. Through personal accounts -- which Google quite openly mines -- Google has an astronomical amount of data about every business.
Google knows more about worker habits than employers. They know more about your city than your municipality. Etc. Etc.
It is in violation of Google's core principles and policies, and will never happen. Ever googler understands, and has it hammered into their brains repeatedly, that the worst thing the company could do is breach user trust by exposing or trading on user/customer data.
Perhaps, but I think it would be entirely within Google's principles to show me employment ads if some combination of my gmail and search usage indicated I might be looking for a new job.
Do the principles and policies you know of have some kind of ethics angle, or is it just about the (quite real) risk of bad PR that could harm the magic cookies driving the ad business?
I don't think it would be illegal due to insider trading laws; there are plenty of finance companies that seek non-public information to trade on, as long as it didn't come from someone with a requirement to safeguard that (i.e. an insider), it seems to be fine.
It would probably be illegal for an employee to do this though without Google's consent; wasn't there a case of a few Chase(?) employees trading on credit card data and being fired and prosecuted?
It could be insider trading under Rule 10b5-2 if an insider gave Google the information with the reasonable expectation that they would keep it confidential. That would apply to some of the information Google has, but wouldn't apply to other information.
If a company used Google Apps for their business email and someone at Google found out about a merger by reading about it in an email that they got from the CEO's email, that would be insider trading because the CEO is an insider and would have had a reasonable expectation that Google would keep their email confidential.
On the other hand, if the CEO by mistake sent an email about the merger to someone who used Gmail who was not an insider, that would not be insider trading because the person who had the expectation of confidentiality was not an insider.
Not just trading, but I wonder if they could take other actions based on that. For example, if your company uses Google Apps, they may not be able to read your individual email but where does it say they can't use aggregate data to figure out if you're up to something?
We've tried Workable, Lever and about half a dozen other platforms. None of them stuck.
What has worked is to do everything in GitHub.
We wrote about it a few years ago [1] and should probably write an updated version of our approach, but in a nutshell;
- When candidates apply through our online form on our website or via email, we create a GitHub issue and assign it to the right person on our team.
- Everybody on the team gets to see who's applying and can easily take part into the discussion.
- We wrote a few small Chrome extensions that act as helpers for managing applications. For example Gdocs Preview [2], which allows us to display the preview of attachments (i.e. resumes) in the GitHub issue directly.
- We've added some automation with Zapier [3] (and some Python) to do things like;
- Automatically close an issue and email the candidate if we label the issue as "To reject",
- Automatically pull email answers from the applicants in the issue thread,
- Automatically send an email asking people to book an interview time with Calendly [4]
- ...
Now, this works mostly because we're a software company first and we're using GitHub for everything [5]. Additionally, compensations and feedback on applicants are shared with the whole team, not sure every organization would be comfortable with that level of transparency.
The main benefit is that there is virtually no friction for team members to help out with recruitment and share their opinion.
It's also part of our on-boarding to point new employees at their recruitment issue; they get to see what we discussed and how we perceived them through the process.
This is impressive, mainly because of the level of clarity around the hiring process and your group's transparency around compensation and candidate feedback. Kudos. Most orgs wouldn't even consider something this open.
Man that UI is ugly. Material Design was a mistake for Google, all of their products look this way. Even the settings page on Chrome looks really bad and confusing.
I like some aspects of material design like layer heights and shadows. But you're right, this looks like someone cracked open a vanilla material design template, added some buttons, and shipped it.
Soon companies will be able to specify wanted personality traits and Google Hire will only recommend them people who visit a certain set of websites and a specific social circle.
It's easy to forget, but LinkedIn doesn't have rich resume data of candidates. With Hire, Google now gets rich resume & employee data - data, when coupled with search history, that can now be used to build better user profiles than before.
Given this, "Hire" is (or could become) a trojan horse into replacing the network effect that LinkedIn has created.
This. Everybody I know uses LinkedIn as their de-facto resume. It is their most up to date and complete CV with all roles, dates, recommendations, education information, skills, links to projects etc.
LinkedIn actually rolled out a new feature "Easy Apply" or something where all you need to do is click an Apply button and it (presumably) sends your profile information to the job.
Most resume's in non-technical fields (think management, banking, consulting, law etc) will have line items of deals/projects/responsibilities with rich information of how many people they've managed, the size of the deal, type of work etc.
Most of the time people don't want to post this on LinkedIn as its too public of a space to go about bragging of your achievements at employer X. With this system, Google basically has a window into this more specific information.
It's possible to load up a traditional resume with 5-10 pages of granular detail like this, but that's actually more awkward than helpful. Once a (shorter) resume establishes basic competence, employers generally want to do the next round of screening based on face-to-face contact. Asking the resume to do all the work will lead you to hire the very best resume writers, rather than the very best candidates. (Note that strong passive candidates, who already have good jobs, do not spend a lot of time polishing their resumes.)
In non-technical fields, taking candidates through a face-to-face interview tends to be the best way of gauging grit, creativity, motivation, fit/compatibility, etc. That's especially true if the job specs are still fluid. In that case, a face-to-face interview lets both sides play around with the job description a bit.
Google is supremely good at coming up with engineering solution to engineering problems, and its decision to build an applicant tracking system is encouraging. But Google also is a bit prone to taking the same approach, no matter what. If we're talking about the full sweep of candidate assessment, that isn't an engineering problem.
"Resumé" appears to have a very special meaning to some people. Triplebyte specifically advertises a "no-resumes" process. But when I interviewed with them, the first thing they asked was "where have you worked before, and what did you do there?"
We (Triplebyte) don't ask engineers where they've worked until the end of the final interview. It's the last thing we ask (after all the technical evaluation and scoring is done). We regularly find and pass great programmers who are totally self-taught (and would have been screened out by any resume screen process). We ask about previous work at the end because we want statistics on who is applying to us. This lets us compare our process to more traditional credential screens (I write about this on our blog)
I'm willing to believe that my memory is wrong and the question came later. But "resumes when we ask for them, which we guarantee we will do" is not quite the same policy as "no resumes".
"Based on your profile in Google Hire and your interest in SpaceX launches, you may be interested to know that a job opportunity is available:
> NASA
> Monte Carlo IV&V Analysis
> Colcord, WV, [9] miles from your home, [15 minute] average commute time.
(... the user has received this message because NASA has put out a job ad using hire and has specified that among the skillsets they're seeking is mathematics and engineering and among the interests that might be related are SpaceX, Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance, etc.)
No. I mean, recruiting is strategic everywhere, sure, but Google pioneered the Disneyland-style offices and perks since its early days. They always used their own software for recruiting as opposed to buying something off the shelf (of those you listed, I think only MSFT has their own thing for applicant tracking, and they were looking at options recently).
Because I'm actively looking for another job, i instantly started thinking, "so how can i hack this to my benefit". Other than having my public profiles easy to have indexed by google, and continuing to apply for relevant jobs, I'm not seeing an angle...at least not one that benefits candidates (like myself) applying for jobs. Unless i'm missing something...?
Exactly! I feel that no one is attempting to create a application that makes it easier on the job seeker. Everything coming out now is to make the recruitment process better, not the actual job search.
...oh, another proprietary system for seekers to jump through a la Taleo? Sounds good to me, as I'm on the other side of the fence with my concept and target market, and will take as many big, heavyweight, Job-Poster oriented targets possible when getting ready to debut or share more about the project.
I wonder if you can skip the "Background Check" as an Applicant just by letting Google run a report for them on your GMail account profile haha.
So how long until Google offers screening/scoring/vetting of applicants based on the data it has about all of us?
All voluntary of course, if you can afford to decline. This isn't far fetched. Employers have asked to access Facebook accounts before, which is extreme and will never catch on (I think).
But allowing Google to rank and match applicants to particular roles may seem harmless enough to many, and then it will become very difficult for anyone to say no.
I bet in the future this will be enhanced with Google providing various stats and scores based on the social and advertising profile people have.
For example a % score with something like this: "Trustworthiness", "Political activism", "Obedience", "Addictions", "Laziness", "Morality", "Extroversion" etc.
It will be opaque and derived from their "secret sauce" by scouring GMail, DNS queries from your IP, phone calls you made on your Android phone, stuff you bought and search for in Chrome and so on.
Some companies and even landlords check credit scores when you apply. Criminal records. Border patrol checks social account postings. Imagine having access to all non-public stuff Google and Facebook has.
I wonder if that some point they'd know people better than people know themselves at. I kinda experienced that with Netflix when I was a subscriber. It suggested movies that at first glance I wouldn't think I'd enjoy but the algorithm had figured me out enough that if I took the suggestion, it usually was right and I ended up liking the movie. It was a pleasant and creepy surprise at the same time.
The interesting thing about this is that it's a very lucrative market and I can see Google pushing this as part of their search results. They've going to have the same kind of Google Shopping or whatever it's called "problem".
If they put this thing front and forward they're going to drive a ton of people out of business just by their sheer visibility, as the Internet's front page.
While the article says google doesn't want to compete with job boards...
"Millions of job seekers start their search on Google every day. And with Hire, you get a career site that’s optimized for Google Search."
I.e. You will get a site that will no doubt be right at the top of google jobs. The aggregation value of the job boards seems pretty minimal then if most candidates start on google anyway
If you are not comfortable using Google products, we are currently using Pipedrive to mange the Recruiting pipeline and has proven to be great.
Haven't tried Hire but seems to be about the same. With Pipedrive you can customize your process, setup reminders that integrate with your Google calendar, search for old canditates, use the budget field for salary, forward emails to keep the history log, add custom fields, etc.
They wrote a blog post about this with some hints https://blog.pipedrive.com/2014/06/how-to-use-pipedrive-for-...
I'm sure that's what Google hopes the enterprise vendors think too. GSuite has already successfully traversed from SMBs to enterprise and if Hire is successful it will likely follow a similar path.
E-mail is a technical problem. Replacing Outlook with GMail is doable.
Recruiting is a complex business process. Enterprise recruiting has significant regulatory hurdles as well as business specific requirements. There is a huge implemementation and service component to an enterprise ATS implementation, there is no "plug and play" here.
I don't even see Google wanting to play that game.
I'm building something new in the hiring space which I hope to release soon.
When you hear about some new entrant to the space that you are creating a new product for, there is the inevitable "gulp" as you urgently scan their features to see how similar it is to your new thing, especially when the product is from a giant company like Google.
Fortunately in this case Google Hire just looks like another "me too" similar to all the other products. I'm hoping what I have built is actually some fresh thinking. Now if can just grind through the remaining tasks in that never ending task list....
Will be interesting to see how Google Hire is used by agencies, as opposed to companies sourcing their own talent.
Obligatory plug: I'm the cofounder of RecruitDoor [1], an applicant tracking system for recruitment agencies. We've been running in South Africa for a few months now, and we'll be branching internationally next month. (Comments and critique welcome, by the way; we're currently still a startup).
Don't you guys realize what is happening? Google potentially can screw you with your careers now. Image they serve up your resume along with the type of porn you searched in the footnote.
Well, they can tell their customers "look, if you search through us we can give you the candidates application along with a nice analysis of their personality, their history, their real interests etc."
I wonder why I don't see candidates jumping up from joy when they hear about it ?
Don't you want to be conveniently tracked, compared, analyzed and disposed of with a couple of clicks ?
Don't you want your professional profile to be sold to the highest bidder some time in the future ?
I mean, I'm sure the software brings order and ease to the hiring process, but somehow this doesn't make me feel good.
It makes me nauseous ... from how insignificant and mechanical this makes us.. people treating people like data...
We were just about to switch to Lever, and then this comes out. Seems like a nice option when we are already using GSuite for everything. Really curious their pricing and abilities though.
> Hire offers businesses a cohesive applicant tracking service that’s deeply integrated with G Suite to make it easier for businesses to communicate with their candidates and track their progress through the interview process.
This seems odd coming from Google, as they're notoriously inconsistent (and/or manipulative) with communication during the application-interview-hiring process.
I can't find a way to contact support (no surprise for a google product) - so if anybody from Google Hire is lurking, the "Webinar" button after the lead capture page leads to a 404 https://imgur.com/a/BIQlZ
What does their usage of the term "verticals" denote?
>>>While Hire itself is interesting in its own right, it’s also interesting to see that Google is now looking to use the G Suite tools and back-end services it has developed over the last few years to solve problems in very specific verticals.
Well, we just released our own ATS add on to our HR package (I won't mention the link here in case it is considered self promotion spam, but it is in my bio).
When setting pricing for our ATS, our research showed that most systems with any level of sophistication was around $8 per employee per month, which is incidentally what our pricing is.
So a small company with 10 employees can use it for $80/mo, but a larger one will go up commensurately.
When you consider though, that this pricing is less than 0.1% of your total monthly wage bill, then it sort of puts things in perspective.
ATS is a brand new module we just released in the past month or so, and is getting good traction to date. There are a lot of standalone ATS systems out there, but our customers (and potential customers) were wanting an all in one integrated solution, so we built it.
Feel free to ping me directly if you have any questions - devan (at) hrpartner.io
I'm surprised they didn't launch on hire.google, and chose to launch it on hire.google.com instead. Apparently Google doesn't see the .Google TLD as a priority for them.
On the plus side, while google may have an advantage for run of the mill jobs - niche sites like stack overflow careers will always have a better ROI for specialized positions.
Can anyone explain the logic behind picking commonly used words as product names? I know this is Google, but isn't it hard to rank well with such generic names?
Duh, they are competing with Microsoft's 365 which is doing just that. Wouldn't be surprised to see Google acquire a CRM company and integrate with with GSuite, or a competitor to PowerBI, etc.
Let's see how many businesses are destroyed and how much money Google makes because of this.
It's a shame they can't just stand back and let people use websites like Indeed, Monster, JobSite among others and let them get on with it and just make money from the ads.
I'd feel worse if the major job boards offered better, more modern products.
The last employer I worked for did recruitment software for the Fortune 500s. We offered career sites (pulling jobs from their ATS) and tools for recruiters to push their jobs to the various boards. From what I can tell having your career site be highly visible / SEO friendly on Google was the most important feature we offered. I agree that it's unfortunate watching giants like Google smash the competition, but it will be interesting to maybe finally see a truly modern job seeker facing job search.
Now if only we can get these horrific ATS-es to join the 21st century with their application process...
Let's see how many businesses are destroyed and how much money Google makes because of this.
If someone writes a script that destroys a business then the business couldn't have been adding much value to whatever it was selling. In this case Hire will likely sink some of the recruiters out there who match words on resumes to words on job descriptions for a 25%-of-the-candidates-salary fee, but that's not really a bad thing. Those people aren't adding value. Recruiters who actually work for their money by finding and coaching candidates, understanding the needs of their clients, actually knowing what those keywords are so they can do a 'fuzzy' match to find good candidates who might not be immediately apparent will still have a solid business offering that's worth paying for.
You have to rank for "language" in " location" first having a purty site one the punter lands on it is all very well and good.
I suspect job ads might go the way of price comparison sites where its now pay to play - its why relex (Elsevier) sold all its job businesses a few years back
It was developed by Bebop, a company Google acquired last year for $380 Million that was founded by Diane Greene (Founder of VMWare). When Google decided to bring Diane Greene on full time to run Google Cloud, they had to purchase her company in order to facilitate that. Bebop originally had aspirations to shake up the enterprise software space by building a suite of applications, and the 'Hire' app was the first one they produced. Bebop employees have been working on it since then and had a long beta period before the launch today. As noted in the TechCrunch article, the 'Hired' platform also runs the Google for Jobs website that launched earlier this year.
http://fortune.com/2016/01/04/google-paid-380-million-for-di...
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bebop