

Google Gets 75,000 Job Applications in 1 Week, Setting Record - petethomas
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-02-03/google-gets-75-000-job-applications-in-one-week-setting-record.html

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rythie
In Europe at least, they seem to also actively look for people too. A
recruiter contacted me via LinkedIn and suggested I apply. I got rejected
after 3 telephone screens, the suggested working somewhere else for a year and
to reapply. I can't see any particular reason I would have stood out and they
didn't mention one.

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jonknee
That's probably in the range of number of resumes that the top job sites get.
Maybe they should start doing something with the rejects?

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jefe78
I was wondering why they never got back to me! 6,000 new hires this year
though? That's downright massive!

I wonder what type of work-load their HR department is under.

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joe24pack
with those odds, why even bother?

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svlla
great, maybe now I won't get email or InMail from Google recruiters who employ
"passive recruiting" techniques anymore...

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meterplech
I'm really impressed. This is especially interesting given all the TechCrunch
type talk of Google falling being Facebook in terms of talent. I'm sure there
are a lot of defections (people do seek pre-IPO options after all) but clearly
Google still has a strong pull for talent.

I think this shows they truly are doing things right w.r.t treating employees
right and creating a great environment to work.

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vortex30
75,000 mediocre job apps == 1 mark zuckerburg

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endtime
Wow. I wonder if a recommendation from a Googler counts for _even more than it
used to_ under these conditions. If any of you Googlers have a sense of this,
I'd be curious to hear what you think.

Edit: emphasis

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jedc
It typically does, particularly if they can speak directly to your work. To
get an interview it's typically more important that you could be a really good
fit for the exact job, too.

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TimothyBurgess
If working for/with Google is the goal, I feel like it would be much more
worthwhile and possibly significantly increase the chances of working for/with
them to create a startup in an area you know Google is looking. Much easier
said than done, but something tells me this approach would be much more likely
to get their attention... plus, you'd probably get a hefty chunk of change
should you join forces.

~~~
nostrademons
I always figured this would be the path I'd take - found a successful startup
and get bought by Google. Instead, the startup floundered and I got hired by
Google anyway.

Regardless of how tough it is to get into Google, founding a successful
startup is still tougher. Plus, if you're _only_ looking to get bought by
Google, you'll be overlooking many other options, and will decrease your
negotiating leverage accordingly. If you want to work at Google, apply to work
at Google, and if you want to found a startup, found a startup. But don't
confuse your motivations for the two of them, because you'll be doing a
disservice both to your startup and to your chances of working at Google.

~~~
TimothyBurgess
All very true. I actually meant to mention something along those lines but
it's been a long day... I should have mentioned that being successful with
your own startup is overall more important because you are definitely not
guaranteed an exit/acquisition. But keeping exits/acquisitions in mind while
creating your infrastructure will greatly increase your ease and your chances
of expansion and/or acquisition.

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c2
Wonder if it's related to all the recent news about Google paying millions to
keep engineers on staff from defecting to Facebook. I would be tempted to work
there if there was a million dollar RSU payout involved.

I also wonder why Google would announce such a thing. My take away from this
is that it's pointless to apply, since there are too many applications. Do
they want people to stop applying?

~~~
facecash
Those who got those counters were top contributers who had often been
neglected by Google's compensational and promotional structure. Most Googlers
are not good enough to work for Facebook.

The vast, vast majority of these applicants have no shot of working for
Google, much less of being then poached by Facebook.

~~~
jarek
"Most Googlers are not good enough to work for Facebook."

Not enough dedication to prying people's lives open, one privacy setting reset
at a time?

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JabavuAdams
It's funny. The main reason I'd want to work at Google is to have access to
their scale of infrastructure.

OTOH, they'd have to be insane to just give random new hires free access to
their infrastructure.

So, if you've got some computing problems that would benefit from scale or
data, maybe the best route is to get a proof-of-concept working on EC2, and
then try to collaborate with Googlers.

This is distinct from the startup->Gacquisitionoogle route, since I'm more
interested in projects than companies (except my on co.)

~~~
nostrademons
Random new hires have free access to their infrastructure, except for private
user data. (For some reason, this always surprises people in interviews - I
know I was surprised when my interviewer said "Oh, it's no big deal if you
want to grab 2000 machines or so and run a MapReduce" - but it's not exactly
confidential, most interviewers will tell you if you ask, and we basically
think nothing of it.)

There are safeguards in place to make sure experimental jobs don't stomp on
production critical ones.

~~~
JabavuAdams
Interesting, thanks!

What if one wanted to run a compute-heavy job with enough machines to give
access to say 10 TB of RAM?

The idea would be to do a few hours of actual computation over a few days of
clock time.

I'll have to think about whether I can phrase this as a MapReduce problem.
Unfortunately it's a side-project, so I can't spare many cycles for it.

~~~
nostrademons
I'm doing that right now.

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webwright
Someone said to me once that a small number of people want to build a great
company. A larger number of people want to work at great companies. I'd wager
that (more and more) Google is less attractive to the former and more
attractive to the latter.

I don't think that bodes well for them.

~~~
rudiger
Why doesn't it bode well for them?

Google is a great company. It's also a big company ($200B market cap, 20,000+
employees). Given their size, it's a tautology that they'll appeal to the
larger number of people who want to _work_ at a great company rather than the
people who want to _build_ a great company.

~~~
jfoutz
People who want to work at a great company are (likely) unwilling to make
radical changes to improve things. People who want to build a great company
would be willing to automate their jobs away, sure that they will find more
work to do. The trained employee, that performs a specific task with direct
supervision will resist new technology that diminishes their importance.

my brother poster points out it's a false dichotomy, but it's fair to say we
all fall in some percentage in one category and the rest in the other. No one
would be comfortable showing up to work tomorrow obsolete. No one would be
happy never growing in their work.

~~~
ez77
_People who want to work at a great company are (likely) unwilling to make
radical changes to improve things._

IBM hired Ted Codd, AT&T Ken Thomson, while Google is currently Rob Pike's
employer. Clearly you would not expect all employees to do basic research (not
even at the Institute for Advanced Study!), but I think _we ain't seen nothing
yet_ in terms of Google's research legacy. (The kind of which you won't find
in a start up.)

~~~
jfoutz
Would Ted Codd tell his boss to cut the database division? It turned out to be
a win for IBM, but if the writing was on the wall, would he seriously cut his
own division and go work on something else? There are thousands of second
best-second brightest that think they're amazing. They might make something
cool someday, they might not. Do you expect them to give up their budget in a
bad year?

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jonpaul
It seems to me that if you're a dev that wants to work at Google, sending them
a cover letter and resume is a waste of time. Google can afford to pick almost
anybody. You've got to stand out. I'd imagine that it's probably best to
become an active contributor to an OSS project that has a lot of impact or
create a startup that could potentially target Google's market and hope to be
acquired. Obviously the startup route is much riskier, but more rewarding.
Regardless, it seems that if you want to work at Google, you've got to make a
name for yourself.

~~~
js2
Get your name on the Chromium AUTHORS file. You'll work with Google employees
and make a contribution to open source.

<http://crbug.com/?q=GoodFirstBug>

[https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/contr...](https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/contributing-
code)

Shameless self-promotion: If you do this and Google still wont talk to you,
RockMelt is hiring - <http://www.rockmelt.com/jobs.html>

~~~
alexgartrell
Google's hiring process is notoriously bureaucratic, and one of the things
that they ask you when you make it into compensation committee is "Do you know
any Google employees?" It feels great to say "Well, when I worked on chromium,
I interacted with [name], [name], and [name]."

You should also know that they're super cool about letting you get into the
AUTHORS file, you just have to write good code that they can use, and they'll
insist that you add yourself as part of the patch.

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cing
At least searching and ranking a mere 75,000 documents to find good employees
shouldn't be a problem for them.

~~~
colonelxc
Though, unless the documents have links to other documents, their main
algorithm (PageRank) isn't going to be very effective.

~~~
mayank
I believe PageRank isn't as important as it was 10 years ago. Besides, you
don't need explicit links to create links. Off the top of my head, the
following could be used to link resumes: keywords, references, educational
institutions, co-authors on papers, and former employers. All these can be
extracted fairly well from a document as structured as a resume, and then you
can go wild with link analysis.

At the very least, it would allow you to filter the chaff, and enough care
could be given to a dataset as small as 75,000 documents to take care of
preprocessing, some manual curation, etc. and yield some decent results. If
you wanted to, you could even compute PageRank scores in R on your laptop for
a dataset that small (and that would probably be the only computationally
intensive part of it, after POS tagging and ML model fitting).

As a bonus, the effort would go a long way to help your recruiting in the
future.

~~~
JabavuAdams
It's unlikely to tell you who's a jerk, or who has a cocaine habit.

~~~
bmelton
Unless the resume has a .gmail address on it. ;-)

~~~
joubert
Or if the email address in the resume has _conversed_ with .gmail addresses.

