All I have the quote from the recruiter. As a referer from a different job category, I was not privy to the committee meeting. I actually had a face to face

All I have the quote from the recruiter. As a referer from a different job category, I was not privy to the committee meeting. I actually had a face to face talk with the recruiter a few days later because it sounded so nuts to me. FWIW, he also quoted somebody from the committee, who said (paraphrasing, it has been several years) "So, we're telling somebody who passed the interview to go work someplace else, this is just insane" We tried to go through some appeals process for women/minorities, but the entire thing seemed to be designed to degrade the candidate & waste their time. Eg, trying to wear them down. This was MTV, and it was several years ago, so perhaps things have changed. I admittedly know very little about the hiring process. The whole hiring, interview process at Google just pissed me off in general so much that I refused to participate when I was there -- never even took the interview training. When we interviewed for our jobs, we were lied to and told we were not doing technical interviews (which it turns out is Google company policy for handling acquisitions, according to a friend of mine from school who was a CTO at a different acquired company). So there I was, at 40ish, totally cold, being asked tech interview questions drawing on uni stuff I hadn't seen in 20ish years. I flubbed the interview, and came in one level below my peers. (though I was promoted after 2 years to the level I was working at). I almost refused to go for the promo, but just treated the entire thing as a joke and wound up getting it easily.