As with all committees, Google's hiring committees seem to fail at one important metric: speed.
I know a lot of smart kids who didn't end up at Google because it took them two or three months to hear back about their interview results and by the time they had already accepted another offer.
I like erring on the side of caution and tough interviews, but there has to be a faster way of doing that. At companies where a manager is hiring for her team, once she has found a good candidate she will want to hire them quickly. There is a sense of urgency. It seems to me that one side effect of not having hiring managers is that this sense of urgency is lost and so no one is really motivated to push for getting back to individual candidates on time.
Speed is important, but it takes a good part of a year for a new engineer to get up to speed. Compared to that, an extra week (which is what the HC introduces) for better selection is worth it.
The real question is whether you get better selection overall by taking more time. The HC may improve decision making on Google's side, but if the lag gets too long you'll start losing people to other offers. And the people most likely to get other offers are probably strongly correlated with those you would eventually choose to hire.
I agree that quality takes precedence over speed, any day. Having said that, I would like to make the following points:
1) From the experience of close friends, it is not an extra week. It is typically at least an extra month. Some times it's even longer.
2) It is not clear to me whether the extra time is being spent on improving the selection or simply being wasted because everyone on the committee has other things to do which introduces delay in reaching quorum+agreement.As an outsider there is no way for me to tell one way or the other, but it's something for Google to think about.
3) Humans hate uncertainty, especially in important life decisions. Many people, given a choice between an uncertain prospect of getting a job at Google and a certain job at a company that is slightly worse than Google, will choose certainty. And there are many companies who are not obviously worse than Google competing for the top talent.
1. Extra interviews required. This has nothing to do with the HC. In many cases, interviewers themselves screwed up here, and told the HC so. The alternative would have been "no-hire."
2. Candidate got redirected to a different department. This resets the hiring clock. This is unfortunate, but the alternative would have been a straight "no-hire."
3. HC too over-committed. I wrote a bit about this in my book and won't go into it here. It's not an easy problem, and Google's scaling problems came into play here.
Reed Hastings makes a case that as a company grows, hiring standards should go up: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664. I agree, and if the consequences is that you have a harder time making a quick decision and have to lose some otherwise good candidates, I think the quick decision is the greater of the two evils.
This is especially true in Google's case, since there's no shortage of candidates willing to wait. Bear in mind that many candidates aren't really waiting: they already have a job and an extra month of latency won't reduce their interests. My brother worked at Intel while applying to Google. It took us 3 months to hire him. While it wasn't fun for him, it also wasn't costly either. (And yes, he took the job)
This is especially true in Google's case, since there's no shortage of candidates willing to wait.
This is the key reason it works for Google. I really like Google's products and hope that y'all continue doing the kind of work that has made this true. If you falter, this will stop working.
I had a standing offer from Google that I passed on, because I was busy doing other stuff. When I decided it was to move on I contacted my Google recruiter amongst other connections. Google didn't reinterview me, I was just extended an offer.
This process was slower than the entire interview loop at the company I am currently at.
So the really smart people find a job in the meantime, the not as smart are DOA for the interviewers/committees. I've always suspected the majority of engineers actually got in together with a business Google had acquired rather than being hired directly. At least it looks much easier.
While of course there are limits to how fast you can get back to candidates, you should know that from "we'd like to schedule a first-round interview" to "we do/don't have a position for you", Microsoft is about 5 times faster than you, and Amazon is about 15 times faster. That's the case for or internships, anyway, to which my experience is limited. I've heard it's pretty much the same story for full time positions.
When I interviewed with Google it was under 2 months from first contact until they sent me an offer letter. I have not interviewed with either MS or Amazon, but I'm quite sure neither one hires senior engineers in a week.
This whole thread is anecdotal, but they are still interesting anecdotes, so here goes. Here's my experience with these companies:
Microsoft: Interviewed with them for an Internship. Very organized, on campus recruiting followed by a fly up and an offer a couple months after the job fair where I submitted my resume.
Amazon: Interviewed for a full time job. I went through two rounds of interviews with one team in under two weeks from submitting my resume; they said my domain-knowledge wasn't a good fit for that team but another team was interested. About two months passed before any follow-up on that, but once that did happen I had three rounds of interviews with that team and an offer within three weeks.
Google: Interviewed with them for an internship. Gave my resume to them. Did not hear anything for about 2 months. Then I got a notification that they wanted to schedule the first round of an interview. Great. Another two months pass, no updates. I get another offer and let them know they have only a few weeks to decide.
Near the end of that few weeks, they call to schedule a phone interview for the following day. Based on one hour-long phonecall with a manager who asked pretty much just basic screener questions, they give me an offer later that day. At that point, for all they knew I could have been someone who could barely code! Granted, this was for an internship so the downside risk to Google was much lower: the internship would have essentially been an expensive three-month interview.
Interestingly, Google and Microsoft did not even consider my resume for full-time positions. The Microsoft recruiter even handed my resume back to me at a recruitment fair, which is the only time I've ever seen that happen! The reason was I did not have a Bachelors degree because I had left to do a startup. When my startup folded, I thought that the experience that had left me would allow me to find something at any of the major big companies (where I could save cash and get ready my next startup), and fortunately Amazon did see this as a positive while Google and MS were hung up on the degree.
A week for a local candidate wasn't unusual when I worked at Amazon (AWS was hiring a lot). After leaving I ended up looking around and got offers from both Google and Microsoft. Google was at least 4x slower and was generally frustrating (took them a month to get back to me after the phone screen). I ended up in a startup. Several people I know had the same experience.
I've heard Google doesn't assign new hires to a team right away, so the hiring process might just be a big talent search, where teams then interview newly acquired talent for a position on their team, after they are in-house.
I can verify, anecdotally. A friend of mine got a full time offer from Google a couple months ago and accepted right away. He's been told won't find out his team until just before starting in June (or July?).
These things change dramatically over time, and as you can imagine, mitigating circumstances and experience can make one candidate's experience vastly different from another's.
One thing I'd like to remind everyone about is that I'm writing about a time long gone. Trying to guess what Google today does based on what Google did 5-6 years ago brings to mind the adage: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
These days there are multiple levels of hiring committee, plus comp, plus Page. Sure some parts are "automatic" but they add useless weeks onto a slow bureaucracy meanwhile goog loses great candidates to companies which move faster. Sure there's a luxury of being the "best place to work" but the cream of the crop are the least willing to wait.
I've heard that engineers work on a starter project for the first few months. The starter project is often assigned a few days before the new hire arrives.
I know a lot of smart kids who didn't end up at Google because it took them two or three months to hear back about their interview results and by the time they had already accepted another offer.
I like erring on the side of caution and tough interviews, but there has to be a faster way of doing that. At companies where a manager is hiring for her team, once she has found a good candidate she will want to hire them quickly. There is a sense of urgency. It seems to me that one side effect of not having hiring managers is that this sense of urgency is lost and so no one is really motivated to push for getting back to individual candidates on time.