Google hiring and research librarians

I was amused by this post by John Battelle, especially by how willing he was to paraphrase what he thought the people at Google were really thinking. It’s actually quite a nice piece of writing.

Looking back on my scattered but still somewhat venomous post of a year or so ago about Google’s hiring practices (among other things), I think I have to give my self a score of 0.5 out of 2 for predictions. (That is, 0.5/1.0 + 0.0/1.0.) The half point is for predicting that maybe Google would come to feel that it had burned too casually and arrogantly through the collective goodwill of the job-applicant pool, and would regret it. (I’m only giving myself half a point, since for all we know their hiring difficulties are purely due to the fact that they can’t offer pre-IPO stock anymore.) The 0.0/1.0 is for predicting that they had burned their bridges with large-university research librarians. Boy, was I wrong on that one. 🙂 If negative points were possible in my prediction-rating scheme, I would be getting them now.

(Full disclosure: I work for a direct competitor of Google’s, and I did start an interview process with them once, which was not exactly a bad experience but definitely a weird one.)

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One response to “Google hiring and research librarians”

  1. Good_Guy

    Google is trying to hire experienced business managers for some non-technical sales and marketing roles (10+ years experience), but asking them to provide undergraduate and graduate transcripts, grades, SAT scores (yes, SAT scores), GMAT scores (a little more undestandable). I hear many experienced managers from Fortune 100 companies, are insulted by this process. If they’re hiring a young college grad from a top university with no work experience, for a technical code-writing position as a software engineer, Google should ask for grades and SAT scores…because those kids have no work experience. But if you want to hire experienced MBAs who have been in the workforce for Fortune 100 companies, you should pay more attention to their experience, driving results at established companies….As Google matures as a business, they will need to change their hiring practices for senior, experienced business people…or they won’t be able to attract them. This is an example of a smart young company acting like a young, immature business….too bad. A close associate of mine terminated the interview process because of this.

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