just playing devil's advocate, but how do we know the reason for the no-hire was the reason the OP thinks it was?
Edit: as pointed out by others, the hiring decision probably does not take a few hours, but under an hour. Still, the point is valid.
It's not because candidates aren't worth it, it's that if you can't come to consensus in that time period, you are unlikely to be able to :)
(I think what they do now makes sense if they want the top of their funnel to be comprised mostly of recent CS grads, and I think that industry people with really high profiles, or that internal people really want, get to skip a lot of this evaluation.)
I have a lot of respect for Google (how could you not). That doesn't mean they can't be a bit clownshoes with recruiting.
I would agree ... if they were actually having trouble hiring from industry.
IE despite everything everyone ever writes here, google simply isn't having trouble attracting enough of the right people that they want to hire (despite arguments to the contrary that they aren't hiring the right people or whatever).
So i can't see an argument that they do it wrong as long as it's actually working.
I expect, if it's truly broken, at some point they will, but
But yeah, I may not have been clear enough before: I do believe that what Google is doing is working for Google.
About the worst thing you can say for Google's recruiting as a business process is that it's somewhat inhumane, and pollutes the industry with faulty evidence (there appears to be a small cottage industry of consulting "porting" Google's recruiting process to other companies). But I mean, look at the rest of Startuplandia and Google's sins pale in comparison.