Having been on both sides, what the applicant often forgets is that you are being compared with the other candidates. It's not about reaching an absolute level. Maybe you were very good that day, but another candidate just was so amazing that she got the job. But you can't know, you just don't have enough information.
That's not true at all. Very few candidates are being considered for positions known in advance.
Applicants' real competition is not other applicants, but other Google employees. As Peter Norvig detailed[0], the bar is set by the Google employees: as interviewers, we should reject any candidate who isn't clearly better than the average googler. And, in my experience, that's a pretty high bar.
That doesn't really seem applicable. Google is more than big enough that they can hire both people if they are both good unless you're applying for a particularly specialized role which it didn't sound like was the case here.
I don't think this is true at all. I'm not saying that they will never hire an extra person in case they find two truly exceptional people (exceptional as in they feel like they really are missing out sending one home, not just that they are good programmers), but I'm sure that most of the times the hiring mechanism is quite compartmented.
If you interview with a specific group/organization, they need some people to do something in that group/organization. Now, it's possible that they leave a good comment about the "second" candidate, and it's possible that other groups eventually will contact them I guess, but I find unlikely that they will just hire two people in a group if they need one.
It's not like the people who interview you are interviewing you for the entire Google.
Most likely for 100 positions they are interviewing several hundred candidates. If their reasoning was like you were suggesting they would end up hiring about 200 people each time. 100 of which would have to find a group to work for.
"I'm sure that most of the times the hiring mechanism is quite compartmented...It's not like the people who interview you are interviewing you for the entire Google."
Absolutely, utterly incorrect. This has all been covered publicly by Peter Norvig[0]. Quoth he, "Another hiring strategy we use is no hiring manager. Whenever you give project managers responsibility for hiring for their own projects they'll take the best candidate in the pool, even if that candidate is sub-standard for the company, because every manager wants some help for their project rather than no help. That's why we do all hiring at the company level, not the project level. First we decide which candidates are above the hiring threshold, and then we decide what projects they can best contribute to."
This is from 2006, 6 years ago. If you work at Google maybe you can say more about your experience.
But what I know for sure it's not like that necessarily anymore, since I talked to many people about their interviews at google and I know some googlers as well that confirmed what I said (which is the reason I wrote it).
Even when I talked to google myself, it was for an individual group, not the entire company (in my case, unlike my friends, it wasn't a software engineer position, though).
Also, and I can tell you this with 1000% certainty, even though they like to say sometimes the opposite, the people I know told me that Google instead has hired more commonly than you can think people that are sub-standard, it's not the normal usual thing, but it has indeed happened.
Also, the recruiters I met, had no clue about what a person with a certain specific Resume could have done in the company. They told me that they often decide whether or not to commit about trying to get a person interviewed based on if they believe they will get hired for a specific position (since that is how they get paid), not necessarily based on who they think is a good general candidate.
Now, I'm not saying that this is a rule, but even if you look at the positions posted now on the company website, they are so detailed and specific that it would make no sense to interview a person at the company level.
It can happen at the new grad level, but I doubt it happens on a common basis. I could be wrong, but I just speak by what I heard first hand.
Of course if with project you mean a specific individual project than I agree, but the company now it's rather big, there is many organizations and stuff that probably don't even know what the others do (still comments from Googlers). This is quite normal since Google can be compared to a campus, in any University nowadays you can be in the same department and do research in a field that is completely unknown to the person sitting next to you in the office since they might work on a different field and it takes years to actually start understanding something about it.
I do work at Google, and I'm saying that Norvig's description is still accurate. It was true when I was hired in 2010, and it's true now for the candidates I interview now.
I'm not sure why it's relevant that Google has sometimes hired sub-standard people. Of course it has. Interviewing isn't perfect, and sometimes we make mistakes.
No, sorry, I didn't meant it in a provokative way. I was just saying it in relation to Norvig's statement.
Although I really like Google and most things about how you guys work, I can't hide that I think it's becoming a common joke how broke the interview process is at Google.
One of my friends told me that they needed, really needed a person, but it still took four months to fill up the position. Another friend was contacted for a PhD software engineer position, and even though he had told the HR person that he was also interviewing for another company, he had time to go through the whole interview process with the other company (consisting on several meetings), and by the time he had an offer, Google still hadn't had the phone interview with him.
I'm just saying that I had the impression that the hiring system isn't not amongst the best ones out there, but I have big respect for how the company works.
Specifically, I think it's great, for example, that they aren't afraid of trying a million things and shut them down when they're not happy. Most companies are afraid of switching and are extremely slow at making any decent change.
But so, just to understand if you want to say something about it, do you really interview a person without a position? Just for the whole company? Or do you mean that if the candidate is good you say 'hire, but for a different position'? Or do you mean something else?
I wouldn't call the interview process at Google broken. While some of my coworkers are better than others, I've yet to encounter any that truly aren't at the top of our field. Whatever we're doing, however we may fail in other areas, the primary goal of interviewing--to find and hire highly qualified people--is something we're achieving.
Yes, we may be rejecting highly qualified people who would do well at Google, but interview poorly. As has been noted in the comments here and elsewhere[0] it's far better to reject a qualified candidate than accept an unqualified candidate. Though we'd all be happier with a higher true positive rate, we're not willing to accept a higher false positive rate to achieve that.
What we're not good at, and what we get lampooned for so frequently (e.g., this story) is that in our pursuit of minimizing our false positive rate, we come off as arrogant, sometimes condescending, and a number of procedural and legal problems exacerbate that appearance. I've interviewed people that were right on the threshold between "hire" and "no hire", and like Joel advises, I wrote down "no hire". I'd love to tell these people what would have swung my opinion and ask them apply again in a year, but I just can't: it's too dangerous.
As far as interactions with recruiters goes, I can't really speak to those issues, since my experience in the hiring process was atypical (though not at all distinct in the ways we've discussed here so far, e.g. being hired for a company and finding a position after an offer has been extended).
Now, to answer your question, I have never interviewed anyone for a specific position. Every single person I've interviewed has been for engineering as a whole. People get interviewed for specific job ladders (e.g. SWE, SRE, SET, etc.) but the specific teams/projects a person will work on is decided after they've accepted an offer, as I understand it (and experience it myself).
By the way, just to clarify because maybe it wasn't really clear, when I said broken I didn't mean at all that the interview process at Google fails at hiring good candidates, I just meant that sometimes it takes literally months and that's too long, and that often people in the meanwhile receive other offers. For many of them it's not possible to say no to another offer just because maybe they will get an offer from Google in two months (and career wise it's not serious to jump around and leave a place after two months unless the position is a lot better).
That's all, and I think it's cool that you interview that way. Maybe I've had a biased opinion given what happened to the people that I directly talked to. Thanks again for clarifying these points.
Note that we do expedite the process for people who receive competing offers; I had an offer from another company the day after my Google interview; I told my recruiter about it and she had me an offer from Google within a week.
I explained in another thread here[0] one of the biggest sources of discontent from people who interview here, in case you're curious.
