I am very open to feedback, thank you for sharing your thoughts. As a quick note just as a reminder, I'm on the PM side of things, so I don't have ANY influence on SWE hiring, and things might not work the same way over there. With that caveat:
Last interview in Jan and hiring committee in March is a terrible experience, and I'm sorry you had to deal with that. When I notice a packet where the interviews were more than a month prior to my seeing them in committee, I ask why, because it's a bad experience. The reasons I have seen that happen are:
- The interview feedback was mixed, and the recruiter wants to go line up a hiring manager to write a statement of support to the committee to help make the case, and that can take time.
- The hiring manager who was already attached has to pause hiring, or is in final talks with another candidate, or goes on leave, and something gets dropped for a while
I'm sure there are others, but those are the big ones. BTW, neither of those are acceptable reasons for things to have gone the way they did for you, I'm just sharing how I have seen it happen.
I'm not sure if you team matched before or after your interviews - at least at Google, they mostly used to team match after interviews and hiring committees, and are now pivoting to team matching BEFORE interviews, partially to avoid experiences like you describe. If a hiring manager is interested and engaged and supportive upfront, they can help push and move things along. In addition, if interview feedback is universally positive, they're looking at skipping hiring commmittee entirely, or doing a lighter review in the interest of speed.
In general, I think these are positive changes that hopefully will streamline things, but it's new and we will have to see.
One point I do want to address is that hiring committees, at least at Google, are not rubber stamps or sanity checks before hiring - we are expected to carefully review each interview against the assessment rubrics, read the notes, ask follow up questions of the interviewers as necessary, privately vote, and then jointly come to a consensus on our recommendation.
Of the packets themselves, those are largely negative don't even go to hiring committee, so we only see the ones where there's at least mixed positive and negative feedback or better. I would estimate that perhaps 10% of the packets I see are "hire" or "strong hire" across the board, and those are the ones where it's a quick sanity check to make sure that nothing unusual happened (e.g. one interviewer was the hiring manager and two others were people who report to the hiring manager). Those are easy, it's great, but it's the exception.
Most packets are a mix of positive and negative feedback, because people are people and conversations are hard, and you're trying to remove as much bias as possible, but stuff happens. Maybe the interviewer wanted a particular answer they didn't get, or maybe there was a misunderstanding, or maybe the candidate got flustered. So when someone says "TC did poorly on this dimension", you look at the notes to see if you also see that, you try to interpret whether something else might have been going on, and then you go look in the other interviews to see if maybe signs of that dimension show up there, positive or negative. Positive? Maybe it was a bad discussion, and you can focus on the other positive signals in the other interviews. Negative? Seems like maybe this is a gap in the candidate's skills.
I'm absolutely not trying to defend your experience, because it's indefensible, and I try to raise a stink when I see it happen (which is not that often). But I wanted to add some context about the role of the hiring committee and the work that goes into making those determinations.
I appreciate your response. As I said, I didn't understand the HC's role during this which was unfortunate. Another recruiter failure.
I did match with the team after the interview which was part of the delay, but that is part of my frustration. It seems to me like the HC could have met post-interview but pre-team match. If the HC says no at that point then fine, I'll move on. If they say yes, it's still on me to find a good team match and if one isn't found than tough luck.
I passed the leet interviews, I had a great interview with an interested hiring manager, at that point everything seemed positive. It's why the HC reject was such a shock.
Thanks for the additional context, it's helpful. Here's my guess as to what happened - you went through your interview loop, and the feedback was mixed, maybe one interview was a "no hire" or two were a "lean no hire". The recruiter decided that your packet was too weak to go to hiring committee as-is, so they went and lined up a hiring manager to support the packet. All of this took time, unfortunately, and then the packet got rejected at HC anyway.
Do you know what level you were interviewing at? At least for PMs, the more junior/early-career levels, the more latitude we are willing to give hiring managers (within reason- big red flags are big red flags regardless) - effectively, if someone is borderline and the hiring manager says "I'm willing to take them on and here's how I'm going to mentor them to address the gaps", I'm typically willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. For more senior levels where the expectations are higher anyway, fundamental skills gaps are more concerning.
All this is just to say - I'm sorry this was such a bad experience. The new hiring process rolling out, where you team match before you interview, is specifically to reduce the cycle times in hiring so we don't miss out on great candidates due to our bureaucracy. I'd encourage you to reapply when you are eligible again - ask your recruiter when you become eligible (a year? I don't remember), but obviously I understand if this experience has soured you on the process entirely. You can also always reach out to me privately - my work email is zito@ (the google).
Last interview in Jan and hiring committee in March is a terrible experience, and I'm sorry you had to deal with that. When I notice a packet where the interviews were more than a month prior to my seeing them in committee, I ask why, because it's a bad experience. The reasons I have seen that happen are:
- The interview feedback was mixed, and the recruiter wants to go line up a hiring manager to write a statement of support to the committee to help make the case, and that can take time.
- The hiring manager who was already attached has to pause hiring, or is in final talks with another candidate, or goes on leave, and something gets dropped for a while
I'm sure there are others, but those are the big ones. BTW, neither of those are acceptable reasons for things to have gone the way they did for you, I'm just sharing how I have seen it happen.
I'm not sure if you team matched before or after your interviews - at least at Google, they mostly used to team match after interviews and hiring committees, and are now pivoting to team matching BEFORE interviews, partially to avoid experiences like you describe. If a hiring manager is interested and engaged and supportive upfront, they can help push and move things along. In addition, if interview feedback is universally positive, they're looking at skipping hiring commmittee entirely, or doing a lighter review in the interest of speed. In general, I think these are positive changes that hopefully will streamline things, but it's new and we will have to see.
One point I do want to address is that hiring committees, at least at Google, are not rubber stamps or sanity checks before hiring - we are expected to carefully review each interview against the assessment rubrics, read the notes, ask follow up questions of the interviewers as necessary, privately vote, and then jointly come to a consensus on our recommendation.
Of the packets themselves, those are largely negative don't even go to hiring committee, so we only see the ones where there's at least mixed positive and negative feedback or better. I would estimate that perhaps 10% of the packets I see are "hire" or "strong hire" across the board, and those are the ones where it's a quick sanity check to make sure that nothing unusual happened (e.g. one interviewer was the hiring manager and two others were people who report to the hiring manager). Those are easy, it's great, but it's the exception.
Most packets are a mix of positive and negative feedback, because people are people and conversations are hard, and you're trying to remove as much bias as possible, but stuff happens. Maybe the interviewer wanted a particular answer they didn't get, or maybe there was a misunderstanding, or maybe the candidate got flustered. So when someone says "TC did poorly on this dimension", you look at the notes to see if you also see that, you try to interpret whether something else might have been going on, and then you go look in the other interviews to see if maybe signs of that dimension show up there, positive or negative. Positive? Maybe it was a bad discussion, and you can focus on the other positive signals in the other interviews. Negative? Seems like maybe this is a gap in the candidate's skills.
I'm absolutely not trying to defend your experience, because it's indefensible, and I try to raise a stink when I see it happen (which is not that often). But I wanted to add some context about the role of the hiring committee and the work that goes into making those determinations.