How to Get Hired at Google, According to a Former Company Recruiter
- Jeff Sipe was a recruiter for Google for five many years, and now he’s a personal tech occupation mentor.
- He states networking with a ‘giving approach’ is the best way to impress Google recruiters.
- This is Jeff Sipe’s story, as advised to reporter Dorothy Cucci.
Whilst I worked at Google from 2013 to 2018, I recruited 1000’s of folks and individually employed about 150. Now I am a non-public tech vocation coach, focusing on supporting candidates with job interview and salary negotiation capabilities.
It depends on the part, but LinkedIn is commonly the major supply tech recruiters use to find candidates. At Google, they use their have strong inner databases to source, but their other go-to is just about usually LinkedIn.
Connecting with folks who now function at the company is arguably the ideal way to get in — from what I’ve noticed, not many people who implement devoid of a referral basically get employed.
The to start with idea I give clientele who want to impress recruiters at major tech corporations is this: network with a providing strategy.
All through my five yrs at Google, most messages I acquired were being together the traces of: “Hello, here’s my resume, could you make sure you locate me a position?”
Recruiters field hundreds of messages from candidates weekly. A significantly better method appears to be like a little something like this:
“Hi! I came across a seriously awesome post on machine learning. I see you happen to be recruiting for machine discovering engineers, and I just assumed I’d share it with you.”
Then, you can pivot the discussion into profession information or your desire in a distinct part. That way, you can expect to be capable to capture the recruiter’s attention and demonstrate what you have to provide the firm.
Also, make it simple for recruiters to call you by giving your e mail and cell phone variety in your message, as perfectly as an up to date resume, and deliver your availability. It would seem very simple, but the broad the greater part of candidates will not give this information and facts appropriate away, which tends to make it far more difficult for us to just take motion for you.
You should really cater your resume to the particular position that you want.
A good way to do this is creating a quick bullet-point summary of your skills at the top of your resume. It is really easy for recruiters to location, and personally, I was significantly much more possible to get hold of a candidate when they did this. It only will take a handful of minutes to insert, and it is significant to modify people bullet factors depending on which occupation you are implementing to.
A lot of men and women say that your LinkedIn profile should seem noticeably unique from your resume — I would argue versus that. I inform my consumers to copy and paste their resume bullets right into their profile since the broad the vast majority of recruiters making use of LinkedIn generally research based mostly on keywords and phrases.
The next biggest mistake I see on candidate’s profiles is no profile image. Recruiters are just about generally much more most likely to arrive at out to you if your profile contains a superior-good quality photo of you from the shoulders up, and you can find data to again it up. (Make confident you are smiling, as well!)
For most positions, the hiring course of action commences with a recruiter monitor. This is a casual telephone phone with a recruiter that generally takes up to a 50 percent hour. After that, the prospect could have any place from a few to give interviews ahead of conference with Google’s employing committee — this is basically a team of your possible peers who will review your job interview feed-back and check with thoughts about your track record and skillset to see if you might be a very good fit.
Ultimately, if that goes nicely, candidates shift on to performing with their recruiter to settle on payment.
Something that differentiates Google from other corporations is that their thoughts tend to lean to open-ended problem sets. (You will find a misconception that Google likes to contain trick inquiries in their interviews — in reality, they really don’t inquire those any more.)
There are a number of keys to answering Google’s interview questions very well.
Firstly, you will need to give a framework that lays out precisely how you reached your remedy, stage by action. This will enable build a visible for your audience, and then you can essentially get into the weeds and address the challenge.
To prepare, compose out instance concerns and then go back again afterwards to tweak them afterwards as desired. Observe with a good friend or mentor. Any occupation coach will explain to you that practising your answers — out loud — will make an incredible change. And then of training course, you want to make confident to do adequate study about your role and the enterprise beforehand.
(A different suggestion: make guaranteed you’re achieving out to the correct person when networking. About 40% of the folks who messaged me on LinkedIn questioned how they could land an internship — I never ever recruited for internships. Again, not performing your investigate will counsel laziness.)
100% of men and women coming in the door at Google ought to be negotiating their payment.
When providing a income, Google will make a market place evaluation. If you are living in New York, for case in point, they’ll consider what most software package engineers in New York are obtaining paid and align with the 75th percentile. So, they are heading to supply additional than normal, but that selection is however reduced for Google. This suggests you can find generally a great deal of salary flexibility.
As prolonged as you are gracious through the negotiation and established the bar higher, you are going to be set — those are the two keys to accomplishment when inquiring for additional income.
A ton of people feel Google is tougher to get into than Harvard, but that is not the circumstance. You really don’t have to occur from a major tech company and you you should not need to have to memorize every single depth about Google’s solutions and companies. As extensive as your competencies align with the posture, any one who prepares the correct way and procedures ample can get in the door — I have noticed it myself.
