I interviewed with Google in May of 2022 and did not get an offer. In early May, a friend gave me a referral to apply and I applied for three different positions. A recruiter contacted me and we chatted about what I had been up to recently and what my situation was. I told her that I was on a tight timeline because I was in the interview process already. She was amazing! She was quick to respond and quick to set things up. She took my experience, along with some examples I provided, and helped me skip through straight to the final round interview. She connected me with another recruiter to handle coordinating that. The next recruiter was not as fast to respond, but still accommodating and cooperative. We briefly chatted and he told me what the interview would look like. I did a round of five interviews. There were three coding style interviews that were 45 minutes. There was one systems design interview which was an hour. There was one behavioral or personality interview that was 45 minutes. I was 15 minutes late to the first coding interview, so that was pretty bad off the bat. It’s because I didn’t communicate well enough with the recruiter. I failed that coding challenge, but solved the others. The systems design interviewer was my favorite. He was clearly into systems design and enjoyed chatting about it. He asked me to expand on the design up and down the stack and to consider it at different scales. It was a very fun thought experiment. There was one interviewer who clearly wasn’t paying attention. I stopped talking after explaining what the code did and sat for a whole minute as I watched her scan her other screen. Then she asked me to explain it again and asked if the code missed an edge case that I had just explained twice. Overall, the interview process was interesting. I was told that they think it’s not the right time for me to join. Perhaps that is true for me too. I am not certain I would have joined at the moment either.

The standard interview process involves five key stages: an initial phone screening, a formal interview with the hiring manager, technical or skills assessments, team-based or panel interviews, and a final culture-fit conversation with senior leadership.