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Inside Google's recruiting machine - Fortune Tech

Inside Google's recruiting machine

February 24, 2012: 5:00 AM ET

Silicon Valley's most venerable recruiting setup is operating in one of the most competitive hiring climates ever.
It just brought on a record number of new employees. Here's how.
By Anne VanderMey, reporter
FORTUNE -- In the hot war for talent being fought in Silicon Valley, no company has
an arsenal quite like Google's. Named Fortune's Best Company to Work For in
2012, the search giant made a record 8,067 hires last year -- boosting total
headcount by a third. The thirteen-year-old firm's recruiting has an almost mythical
quality about it, particularly for the two million candidates applying to work there
each year. In terms of elite American institutions, getting a job at Google ranks with
being admitted to Stanford Graduate School of Business or becoming a Navy Seal.
Behind the glitz there are a few Googley basics at work: data, money (lots of it),
sophisticated programming, and an army of young, eager recruiters.
Google (GOOG) does not release its recruiter headcount. It is likely huge. In 2009,
the company revealed that there were about 400 internal recruiters. John Sullivan, a San Francisco State University
professor who has studied Google and advises companies on hiring, estimates that the number across all departments and
countries is closer to 1,000, with about 300 full-time recruiters in the U.S. and more than 600 contractors. More conservative
estimates put the tally at 500. Even if the lower figure was correct, Google would have one recruiter for every 64 employees.
That's a far higher ratio than the 577-to-1 average for most large companies, according to the Corporate Executive Board.
Who are Google's recruiters? They're young, highly paid and, often, on a six month contract. "They're probably the company
that I've seen that uses the most [contractors]," says Michael A. Morell, co-founder and managing partner of Silicon Valley
recruiting firm Riviera Partners. "There's a lot to be said for new people trying to prove themselves in the first six to 12
months." It's difficult to find an accurate or exact employee-to-recruiter ratio at the company, the number of recruiters varies
dramatically. At any given time, Sullivan says, 70% of the recruiting staff might be on contract. That changes, though, as
Google feels the need to gear up or cut back on hiring. "We want the best of the best to come to Google," says Todd
Carlisle, its director of staffing. "We budget what it takes to find the best of the best."
MORE: Motorola is the ammo Google needs
This lends the company considerable flexibility depending on its staffing needs. "If you need to scale down, you fire 50
people and it's fine," says one former Google recruiter who declined to be identified because of the company's
nondisclosure policy. "In two months you hire 50 to 100 and get it going again. It's very efficient and very effective, but the
thing is, it's also very expensive." Calling Google's recruiting efforts a machine is not much of a stretch.
Sullivan says Google's recruiting budget is the largest he has ever seen at a private company. The decision to pour in such
resources comes, he says, from a calculation the company made early on that a top-notch engineer is worth dramatically
more than an average one. If a great employee is worth 300 times more than average one, as one Google executive
speculated in 2005, it makes sense to spend 10 times more on recruiting. That also partially explains why the company
provides lavish perks, job flexibility, and time for personal projects. Not to mention, why CEO Larry Page still
approves every hire personally. When it comes to picking up talent, "it's not like they are number one and someone else is
close," Sullivan says. "They are in a different league."
Which isn't to say being a Google recruiter is easy. One common complaint is that the process is so well thought out, and so
mechanical, that it gets boring for the human beings involved. Instead of relying just on seasoned, full-cycle recruiters
(though it does have those), Google breaks down the process into different functions -- sourcing, coordinating, college-only,
etc. Zach Nadler, who now works in his family's insurance business, interviewed for a sourcing job at the company, but
abandoned the interview process after getting a feel for the position. "The pay would be fine, but it didn't seem that exciting,
surfing the Internet all day," Nadler said. "The people that they have on the staffing side are the only ones that seem to
grumble," adds David Voss, COO of Foxhunt Staffing in Los Altos, near Mountain View.
MORE: Google's bet on 'consumerization'
There are jobs for a wide variety of specific roles. "There's a lot of guys I get paper on that says 'Google recruiter,'" Morell
says. "But you have to do a lot of probing to get to what was their function." Many companies use similar strategies, but
Google's trademark analytics have made it into something resembling art. "Get guys up to speed very quickly and you just
plug them in. It's really what we do at the infantry level in the army. Keep feeding them into the machine." Individually, they're
good. But working within the Google system? "They achieve stuff as a group that exceeds anybody's expectations," Morell
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Inside Google's recruiting machine - Fortune Tech

says.
And joining the Google recruiting machine can be a very appealing proposition for budding HR professionals, even if the
jobs aren't permanent. "You can get more than $200,000 a year," the former Google recruiter claims. "There's no real
stability, but it's a fair amount of money for a 23-year-old." Another former employee who declined to be identified says she
"loved" work and the company, where she was a full-cycle recruiter for about 11 months. Plus she added, "It will probably
never be easier to get someone to respond to a cold call."
Like so many projects at Google, data pumps through the recruiting organization's veins. An internally designed candidatetracking program used by recruiters is said to be a thing of mathematical beauty. The company eschews job boards and
embraces direct sourcing, to the point where many engineers in the Valley regularly hear from the company. Nick BergsonShilcock, a co-founder of hiring startup Hackruiter, says he gets an e-mail checking in about once every six months. So giant
and so aggressive is Google's machine, a possibly apocryphal but no less telling story goes like this: a happily-employed
Google engineer finds a recruiting e-mail in her inbox from her own employer.
MORE: Santorum's 'Google problem' isn't Google's problem
The system does have its flaws. Employees have complained that hiring is too focused on coding, that the emphasis on
analytics misses creative talent, and that the interview system can be badly disorganized. A widely circulated 2008 e-mail
thread of exiting Google employees excoriated the hiring process for being unnecessarily bureaucratic and arduous. The
company, Carlisle counters, is constantly reworking the mechanics.
In the last year, Google has changed a few of the distinctive features of its hiring process. It scaled back the focus on GPA
and standardized testing scores. "We no longer ask candidates for the GPAs if they've been out of school for three years,"
Carlisle says. Standardized test scores are no longer required for any candidate. The company also got rid of most of its
riddle-like questions such as, How many golf balls fit in a school bus? They have been replaced with questions more closely
related to the job. "We used to look more at school selectivity," Carlisle says. "Now it's not really a factor as long as we can
prove that the person is smart."
Perhaps most importantly, Google has drastically cut the time it takes a candidate to wend his way through the process.
Where it once toke as long as six months from application to hire, Carlisle says, it now takes about a month and a half. The
previous average time was about 100 days. And where it was once commonplace to sit for 10 interviews, Carlisle crunched
the numbers and found that every interview after the fourth one increased useful knowledge about an applicant only by
about 1%. The company now caps the number of interviews at five.
Google is famous for hiring talent for talent's sake, even when there aren't any openings. The philosophy is cut-throat. The
company is thinking, "not only do I have the best, but you don't," Sullivan says. As in basketball, "if you have all the 7-foot
centers, you're going to win a lot of games." And they have the math to back it up, nowhere near a universal feature in HR
departments. Studying the company, Sullivan says, has been humbling. Seeing it, "[You think] oh my God, this machine is
going to take over the world."
Clarification: Many Google recruiters are on a six month contract, but stay longer. Google disputes Mr. Nadler's view.

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