Many companies do a pre-interview screen performed by recruiters to filter obviously bad candidates. I have personally helped construct such screens -- though not at google.
Ensuring the recruiter understands the difference between an answer over their head and a wrong answer is crucial. What we did was to make sure the recruiters understood that answers they didn't understand needed to be surfaced to someone in engineering for a sanity check.
Often our strongest candidates would give an answer which recruiting wasn't capable of vetting. The key is making everyone aware that the answers may not fit the script, and that this is OK. Recruiters shouldn't be judging the technical details of an answer; they should be looking for "gosh I don't know I've never seen that."
Pre-screening is sadly necessary when doing high volume recruiting. There are a LOT of people out there who grossly inflate their competency.
It saddens me slightly how far down the page your comment is, as that's exactly what's going on here. I've also (and also not at Google) had a hand in constructing these. It's a nightmare on the hiring side, too.
We tried very hard to tailor our questions such that the candidate — if they new the answer — would only give one exact answer. Ours included a download of sample data to operate on; one was a question along the lines of "count the number of lines in any .h files that contain the following pattern <human description of the patter>"; the answer ends up being a single integer.
My experience has been — overwhelmingly — that recruiters hiring for technical positions are incredibly non-technical. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, except for, as mentioned, the huge amount of winnowing required to just find candidate that are suitable to advance to a phone screen with an engineer.
> There are a LOT of people out there who grossly inflate their competency.
Ensuring the recruiter understands the difference between an answer over their head and a wrong answer is crucial. What we did was to make sure the recruiters understood that answers they didn't understand needed to be surfaced to someone in engineering for a sanity check.
Often our strongest candidates would give an answer which recruiting wasn't capable of vetting. The key is making everyone aware that the answers may not fit the script, and that this is OK. Recruiters shouldn't be judging the technical details of an answer; they should be looking for "gosh I don't know I've never seen that."
Pre-screening is sadly necessary when doing high volume recruiting. There are a LOT of people out there who grossly inflate their competency.