[ILUG] Google "behind the scenes" tech talk

[Colm Buckley]

On 16 Nov 2004, at 14:39, Martin List-Petersen wrote:

> Sorry, but smart engineers usually are smart enough not to go through 6
> interviews to get employed, unless they are desperate.  Usually someone
> else would have snatched them off the market before.

Consider it from Google's point of view.  We spend a *lot* of time on 
the hiring process.  I don't know the exact figures, but it's somewhere 
north of 40 man-hours per hire.  The whole process is designed to be as 
impartial as possible, and to eliminate both "good luck" and "bad luck" 
from the process; we don't want to lose people just because they had a 
bad day, and conversely don't want to hire someone just because they 
happened to have a rapport with one interviewer, or got lucky with our 
tech questions.

So we set up multiple interviews with each candidate (usually about 6 
for engineers; often a lot more for managers - I had 13), and then the 
interviewers each enter their feedback independently.  Then the hiring 
committee (recruiters, group managers) look at all the feedback and 
make decisions.  This formula has been found to work *very* well; with 
the main drawback being that the recruitment process can drag on a bit 
[as you mention].  It's not rocket science, nor particularly 
mysterious, but it does get us excellent employees.  We haven't found 
that the resulting hires are "desperate", nor has competing offers been 
much of a problem - if someone wants to work for us and we want them to 
work for us, then it usually happens.  All jobs are not alike.

	Colm

-- 
Colm Buckley / colm at tuatha.org / www.colm.buckley.name / +353 87 2469146