The recruiter-screeners in this case don't know anything, they're just looking for you to answer some questions against a table of "right answers", and they wouldn't know it if you answered in a way that was technically correct, but not in the answer key.
The reasoning behind this, sadly, is that Google thinks it tuned its hiring questions to reduce the rate of false positives- hiring an unqualified person into a role- at the expense of false negatives (not hiring a qualified person). Eventually, I stopped referring people to Google as the process was quite capricious. I told anybody who wanted to apply to read everything online about the process, memorize CLR and leetcode, and then tell the interviewers what they wanted to hear.
Most Googlers I know are not at all confident that they would get their job back if they had to reinterview for it, including those with top performance review ratings.
I once helped author the hiring guidelines and questions used for recruiting and interviewing. After months of effort, the committee proudly, euphorically called the effort good.
I then asked the committee "Who here could pass the high bar we just set?"
Total buzz kill.
The upside was I was never asked to help again.
Obviously Google has had some success in this space as their opinions are highly influential, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if they were successful in spite of their interview practices—especially in the early days—because jobs at Google were much-coveted: talent from all over the world sought out a job there because the money and the prestige was just so damned good.
And it happened to me also. Those recruiters were hilarious, you cannot make that up. I got 8 of 10 by luck, but refused a 2nd exchange with those bots.
I also had one (I forget the exact question) where my answer was technically correct but “wasn’t what [they] had”, and my explanation about why it was the same thing went way over the recruiter’s head.
Whoever thought this would be a fun little trivia game to have people play for their careers…yeah, no.
I still got through to the technical interviews wherein the first technical screener told me he doubts he’d be able to get his current position again now if he had to go through the interview for it, and he told me seriously not to feel bad if I don’t pass. I did pass that one.
Second technical screen was with a person with a thick accent and bad VoIP who was getting obviously frustrated due to both of us having to repeat stuff a lot.
This was all after a 6+ month dance of scheduling and waiting and hearing nothing from their recruiters. Got a rejection weeks later and never tried re-applying. They still reach out like every 6 months.
It seems nowadays the process is much more reasonable, but Google is still far behind other FAANG companies in regard to their interviewing process, in my opinion.
IMO, a better approach now are basic on line code screens designed to take 15m for a qualified candidate. The goal of which is to show you are serious about the tech stuff and give people a way to bow out gracefully.
If someone is a pass in the first 10 minutes, the next 35 minutes are me trying to sell the company to the candidate. This is not, even slightly, a waste of time.
I have Allied Mastercomputer levels of HATE for whichever HR drone decided that "interviewing candidates" needed to be a bullet point in the "corporate evaluation process" and thus made the interviewing process even shittier than it needed to be.
I've also talked to people with terrible resumes who turn out to be great. They are just bad at resumes.
No is saying they should rely solely on resume review as a screen.
What is under question here is the perceived wisdom (on Google's side) of screening for Director positions using badly programmed chatbots (or recruiters, whatever) instead of having them be asked the same questions by an actual human.
IMO, a better approach now are basic on line code screens designed to take 15m for a qualified candidate.
Perhaps, but companies like to screw that up as well -- having people code into a Word doc, for example (try it sometime), or assigning problems that are either brain teasers or essentially willingness-to-cram filters rather than what they should be -- a simple, straightforward test of minimal programming ability (to determine whether further time investment is merited).
“What is the type of the packets exchanged to establish a TCP connection?” - as soon as I read the question, I knew right away the author would give the exact hex, and the recruiter would want the three letter acronyms.
Perhaps this was a brilliant engineer disguising a personality interview as a technical one. Personally I would want my coworker or boss to be someone with enough awareness to have passed this interview. Compassion, empathy, social awareness, understanding someone else’s role and perspective, setting aside your ego to help a conversation go smoothly - important for a director to have.
I wonder how many teams of working engineers would get them right without cramming?
"Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge"
If it was just their attitude, they’d not tell them they were wrong when they weren’t and tell them to work on x y and z to be qualified in the future. They’d just complete or end the interview and say something like, “Great! You should hear back in x days” and then reject in their ATS.
If not, then the recruiter is an asshole and gaslighting the candidate.
