I have a friend who just accepted a position at Google, and she said the process was long and arduous, but it wasn't a horror story.
At that point, I contacted his boss, who thanked me for "letting her know". A few days later I got a call from my new recruiter, who was going on vacation the following day for two weeks. I didn't end up getting placed with a team until about three weeks later.
It's not exactly a horror story, but it wasn't a great first impression either. Other engineers I talked to had similar stories.
That information is well above your classification level, citizen.
Are you a communist?
The hiring committee is Google's answer to that. The idea is to completely divorce the hiring decision from people who have personally known the candidate. Instead, there's a very broad written information channel between interviewers, references, recruiters, and the hiring committee. But it remains written, so that all your unconscious biases about people stay out of the decision, and at least in theory, it's all based on hard data.
The HC appears to serve only as a layer of noise/a random selection filter to determine who is actually offered a job.
As long as the decision is made by humans, you will never get a completely unbiased result, because humans have biases. It's the same in every field - people pretend science is objective because it relies on data, but if you read Kuhn, you'll see that a lot of science is personality cults and subjective opinions and schools of thought. People pretend Google's search algorithms are objective because they rely strictly on numbers and data, but they're written by humans, and humans choose which data is important.
But that doesn't make the data useless. The act of being forced to support your opinions with data makes you dig much deeper into them, and surfaces relevant information that'd otherwise be ignored immediately because it doesn't fit your preconceptions.
Think about science vs. polemics. If you're actually doing original research in a scientific field, you'll realize that there's a lot of uncertainty hidden behind "the scientific consensus", and a lot of other ways of interpreting that same data. But that doesn't mean that the scientific consensus is wrong. It may be wrong, but it's probably less wrong than whatever vitriol Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck or Michael Moore is spouting at the moment.
Impossible. The interviewers, just like us, are human. They come with a bunch of built-in biases that will show through in any contact they have with the hiring committee, whether it's verbal or written.
I just don't see your "theory" holding up in reality.
And I don't see this as a bad thing. As someone making a hiring decision, I want the emotion. I want to personally talk to the interviewer and get full impression of what they thought of the candidate. You're not going to get that through an email. Technical competence is only one part of the equation. If one of this person's potential teammates doesn't feel good about the prospect of working with the candidate, I want to know that.
Of course, Google has this ridiculous idea that they can hire people and only later decide what they'll be working on and which team they'll be working in. So you end up hiring people who don't even meet their team until after they start. I just can't imagine working for a company like that -- from the perspective of the existing employee, even.
Culture fit is one of the dimensions that candidates are evaluated on. But again, feedback needs to have supporting data. If you didn't like a candidate, you have to say "Didn't have a firm handshake" vs. "Appeared combative and arrogant when faced with a problem he couldn't solve; said 'Google's interview process is a bunch of technical trivia bullshit' before stomping out of the room", so that the hiring committee can judge whether this is just a nit specific to the interviewer or an actual problem that will impact the candidate's prospective teammates.
The reason why new hires don't know their teams is because of Google's corporate secrecy policies: most of the time, the projects they're working on haven't launched, and therefore can't be talked about outside the company. Even then, there are exceptions. When I was hired, I was told which department I'd be working in before I signed my offer letter, who my manager and his manager were, and was given the option of working elsewhere in the company if I really disliked that. My teammate actually negotiated the specific project he'd be working on, and they created the project for him. You need to have negotiating leverage to do this, though: they not only have to want you enough for you to get hired, they have to want you more than the vast majority of other hires, enough that they're willing to bend the rules a bit.
The recruiting/interview process at Google has a lot of problems, but I don't think that either the interviewer/HC split or the whole-company teams-later approach are part of them. Both of these were created to solve specific problems that have crept into the hiring practices of other big companies, and by and large, do a better job at it than the alternatives.
A company does not have to guard against 'bias' other than racial, religious and that sort of thing. 'Bias' towards (or against) people you know is called knowledge.
I had an awesome hiring experience. Extremely responsive recruiter (I understand that's not always the case given the number of temps). Took me two weeks from on site to getting an offer. Everyone I referred so far had a similar experience.
To be fair, I definitely believe all of these horror stories are true and deserved. I think that Google just operates at such a ridiculous scale that it's hard to get everything working together just right. I believe "the system works" in the majority case, but that outliers are particularly bad.
A better approach would be to vet me thoroughly before contacting me. In other words, only contact me if you're sure that you can at least put me through a single interview.
Getting a rejection after that (and all the psychological baggage that comes with a company "rejecting you") makes it a bitter loss.
Same process (just as broken), but the outcome is hugely influential.
I think you're spot on, tho -- the squeaky wheel is the one that complains to internet forums.
I left about six months ago, and while there were things I didn't like about the hiring and interview process, it was still significantly better than any other place I've worked.
But I wouldn't call the process significantly better than anywhere else. I've had plenty of other interviews on par with that, some better, some worse.
From the viewpoint of interviewer and hirer rather than interviewee, I thought the process was better than anywhere else I've worked.
I liked the expected level of rigor, I liked the decisions being made by a separate committee, and I liked the salary package being set by yet another group.
The main problems I saw were: * recruiters dropping the contact chain with the candidate * interviewers not preparing enough * not enough of a feedback cycle to interviewers about their performance.