Google works with experienced and friendly recruiters. I'm glad that the interview process didn't really take so long and the recruiters tried to help from the beginning to the end of this process.
First of all, the recruiter found my resume on their database as a good match with the position and contacted with me over the phone. In this conversation, she asked me a couple of questions about my background and tried to understand if i am really a good fit for this position. As this interview was successful, she arranged a phone interview with the hiring manager. The hiring manager's questions were a mix of technical and practical knowledge. After the technical SQL question, he asked me a practical case question about using statistical modeling for decision making, and we brainstormed different scenarios based on my responses.
Finally, they invited me to have a face-to-face interview in their headquarters. The travel company they work with was rude to me when i tried to reserve the flight ticket and the hotel. Hotel was a local hotel around that area, but I would expect from Google to provide the interviewers a better hotel to stay, because i could only sleep only for about 2 hours at this hotel before the interview and I felt very tired throughout the interview day. Before the interview, I left the hotel earlier than I should, but thanks to the traffic I arrived 5-10 minutes late, even though I used a GPS. I would recommend the other interviewers to request a limo, or leave the hotel at least 30 minutes earlier than they should.
I met with the recruiter in the beginning, and she gave me some preliminary information about the overall interview and she tried to give me some tips. She told me that i should keep my questions to the manager in the last meeting. Afterwards, I had three meetings with two managers and one senior engineer. First interview was a behavioral interview, and the manager asked a few questions about how i would handle situations by giving examples from my prior experiences. He asked me if i have any questions to him, but because of the little miscommunication between me and the recruiter, I told him that i don't have any questions. By the way, the behavioral meeting seemed to be the most important meeting in the whole process.
The second meeting was a technical meeting with the engineer, and he asked me questions to learn more about my database and programming skills. This meeting was the easiest and probably the least important one. The last interview was a business interview and the manager asked questions to learn more about my problem solving skills by asking how would i solve problems based on different scenarios. This was my favorite meeting overall and it was really fun.
After these meetings, I had a lunch with the recruiter and she showed me the Google campus and the facilities. Most importantly, i really liked to see Google workers were very happy and proud to work for Google. It was an exciting experience for me. After leaving the Google campus, I drove around the city to get a better sense of the location, and went to the airport. I had a very long sleep after this tiring experience. I woke up with the call from the recruiter and she told me that the result was negative.
