Google seems to do lots of things to keep track of potential hires. A year ago, I received an email from a Google recruiter that gave the impression of being written personally and directly to me, with wording like "we've reviewed your resume", "the engineering team think you'll fit in" and "they would like to talk to you". It was almost perfectly crafted to create the illusion that a team of people in my specific profession had spent time looking at my information, and really wanted to talk to me. The illusion was broken by looking at the email address they sent the email to - it was a tagged address that only had been used once in a Debian mailing list many years ago.
I asked the recruiter for an explanation about this practice, but they never got back to me.
I asked the recruiter for an explanation about this practice, but they never got back to me.