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Hire by Google: Applicant tracking system and recruiting software (2017)
- alecco 8y agoSince when are Google's hiring practices good? As many of us experienced, the process is dismal and extremely disrespectful with the candidates. They get away with it because of their fame. * Bad scheduling of phone interviews * No answers for long swaths of time * 1 liner rejection emails * Terrible matching of skills vs jobs (e.g. offering entry level SRE to experienced people) * Cookie-cutter interviews Now, what makes me wonder is why are they making this system? What's in it for Google? And good luck expecting them to keep it up for more than a couple of years.
- iMerNibor 8y ago> What's in it for Google? Data, presumably? Also expanding the capabilities of their GSuite to capture more customers into their ecosystem
- cm2187 8y agoI think that’s it: it seems everyone (at least Google and Microsoft) is going after SAP and salesforce to become the infrastructure of businesses.
- cobookman 8y agoEnterprise offerings have strict data usage guidelines. Aka Google can't use the data. https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-whitepaper/page-6.html https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...
- Kudos 8y agoThey're probably pretty good at the logistics of hiring, which this product seems to be focused on. The performance of individual Google recruiters shouldn't impact it.
- Aeolun 8y agoJust their hiring practices. One line rejections are not a ‘single recruiter’ thing.
- alecco 8y agoBut their experience is quite unusual. They have many people keen to join them so they can do stupid things and not notice it. Most other companies don't have this magnet to favor them. Have you tried hiring in tech recently? Good candidates disappear after a week. You have to move fast. And even if you are good many candidates slip through your fingers. I doubt Google's Hire service would help me much on that. * You need someone at least slightly technical to screen CVs. * Then screen round 2 with truly technical people, ideally from target teams. * Then figuring out if any of the job openings is a match for the candidate (from language to expected job position) * Then a very personal call with them * Then a single planned-ahead phone interview with goals (e.g. is the candidate really competent with X) * Then interview on-site in a single afternoon/morning (take them to lunch!) * Offer should be in a short time, ideally the day of the on-site interviews. Or you can do what most people do and just offer 30% above market, cross your fingers, and see what sticks.
- detaro 8y agoIf "most people" offer 30% above market, isn't that the new market rate?
- alecco 8y agoIt's not a simple thing. For 30% I wouldn't switch my job to a random company whose first impression is hiring incompetence.
- user5994461 8y agoYou should switch. Worst case scenario you get back to your current company in a few months with a 30% pay rise.
- 8y ago
- eveningcoffee 8y ago> What's in it for Google? Control and data? Perhaps they have something dystopian in mind? Edit: It is also another reason to hide from Google.
- andybak 8y ago> Perhaps they have something dystopian in mind? Oh come on. We've all conceded the days of "Don't be evil" are long gone but Google's type of evil hasn't quite shifted to that of cackling supervillain. It's an evil bred from arrogance, naivety and self-interest - not from an active intent to corrupt society.
- go_away_nsa 8y agoThey are working on censoring search results for the Chinese government. Worse, they are opening a AI research center in China as well. All of that research will be in the hands of the Chinese government and weaponized to control their own population and against foreign countries. Meanwhile, Google backed out of a contract with the US military after moral outrage by their employees.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoIn other words: It's the same kind of evil as all real evil, not the kind of evil that is purely fictional. Your point being?
- andybak 8y agoI think you're making the same point as me in that case. It was morningcoffee that had James Bond supervillains in mind.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoIC--I read them more as "something that is dystopian" rather than "something that is intended to be dystopian".
- 8y ago
- antpls 8y agoTwo long-term aspects, in my point of view : - social AI and automation challenge : recruitment is a process where humans are important and cannot be replaced for now, because of the soft and reassuring aspect of human interactions. The call centers and this will provide nice playfields to make AI more "humans". - data : what could you do if you had access to all the contents of the job offers in the market, the people motivations, and the timeline of all interactions? That's something they may already have access to by buying data from providers, but with that they go to the source. Given the quantity of actors in the online recruitment service field, it is not surprising to watch Google enter the arena.
- himynameistimli 8y agoI'm not so certain it's for the data. If it were, then I would assume that the pricing would be much more competitive.
- zavi 8y ago> What's in it for Google? It's part of GSuite so $$$. You have to pay for GSuite.
- register 8y agoI didn't experience most of the points above but I completely agree on the very bad match of skills vs job: that happened to me just a couple of months ago.
- mattlondon 8y ago> What's in it for Google? It is a commercial offering: https://hire.google.com/pricing/ https://hire.google.com/pricing/ This is the software for the logistics of hiring, not "hiring as a service", so I dont think that the things you point out have much to with this unless other companies that purchase this software are guilty of the same things.
- TulliusCicero 8y agoThose issues are due to policies, not software. For example, Google has "cookie cutter interviews" because they intentionally hire most devs as generalists. But another company doesn't have to do the same thing, even if they're using the same tech.
- MrMorden 8y agoI'd describe Google's interaction with applicants as more average than dismal. Ghosting is far more common than you'd think (hence the recent stories about employees ghosting back twice as hard), and if you want utterly clueless ask a coworker who's done classified work about how incompetent Beltway-bandit recruiters and HR departments are.
- sieabahlpark 8y agoSo when is it shutting down?
- sidcool 8y agoThis is a GSuite product, so most likely it's not going away for a long time.
- Adamantcheese 8y agoAh yes, yet another applicant tracking system that will likely not solve any of the problems the other ones have had. Especially since I presume this has been an internal tool for some time.
- manbash 8y agoThis seems to be around since 2017. What am I missing?
- alecco 8y agoAnd posted by a barely active account.
- thecatspaw 8y agoseems plenty active to me. Am I not active enough for you either?
- Lio 8y agoGoogle is in publicly collected health care data. Google is in surveillance via location service. Google is browser tracking. Presumably if you want to apply for a job with a company that uses Google Hire you won’t be opt out of Google processing your personal data. It’s the candidate “discovery” feature that worries me the most. Howlong before Google offersto prefilter candidates it thinks are bad eggs based on the profile it’s building on you?
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoWhich in turn would naturally include anybody Google has chosen to blacklist from their services for whatever opaque reason. Google's vision of the future seems to have changed fairly starkly in recent years and in a very bad way. Hopefully this is yet another Google service flop because the alternative is edging rapidly towards dystopia.
- polskibus 8y agoWhat's next? Google CRM? Google ERP? Similar story to Microsoft' invoicing system that had been rolled out a while back. The smaller players will most likely get pushed out (even if their product is better but offers less horizontally), sometimes while paying for computing power on the platform that is competing with them.
- hkdobrev 8y agoWe're using it as our applicant tracking system. My feeling is this is a separate team as it's in the end hosted on hire.withgoogle.com. Probably the team got acquired and it was initially run as an experiment. Anyway, this is just an assumption. The tool is quite good and the price is not that high compared to others. It's like an add-on on top of G Suite compared to the built-in apps, but has pretty tight integration with GMail and Calendar. You can configure it quite a bit and the only thing that seems to be inherited from Google own hiring practices is the interview scheduling where X number of people would do back-to-back interviews with the candidate. But this could also be worked around if not needed. One thing which is a weak spot is the careers iframe you can embed. They also provide a JSON feed so you can render yourself, but the built-in rendering is so basic they basically force you not to use it. Overall, we're pretty happy with it for the couple of months we've used it and it certainly is neither a blocker or an enabler of bad hiring practices as mentioned in some of the other comments.
- ageitgey 8y ago> My feeling is this is a separate team as it's in the end hosted on hire.withgoogle.com. Probably the team got acquired and it was initially run as an experiment. Anyway, this is just an assumption. You're correct, it was a startup they acquired - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bebop https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bebop
- hobo_mark 8y agoWow, so that's how Diane Greene ended up at Google? (she's now CEO of Google Cloud).
- fstanis 8y agoShe also sits in Alphabet's Board of Directors: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/board.html https://abc.xyz/investor/other/board.html IIRC, she's been there since 2012. Her role in Google [Cloud] came much after.
- jamest 8y agoThis is the product that evolved from the Bebop acquisition (Diane Greene's company that was acquired to bring her in to lead Google Cloud). Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bebop#section-overview https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bebop#section-overvi... Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839646
- pknerd 8y agoSo far Google is not sure about good talent other companies hire. Now with this system, they can use AI/ML to steal the potential job quitter earlier than he is hired by the competitor. Well done guys!
- billyggruff 8y agoHow is this not an antitrust issue, particularly considering past wage supression behaviors?
- icebraining 8y agoHypothetical scenarios are not antitrust issues.
- abalos 8y agoPlease read this: https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-whitepaper/page-6.html https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...
- pknerd 8y agoRead above. No where I mentioned about Ads.
- ironjunkie 8y agoI'm wondering when the Google brand is going to go down in reputation. It seems to me that the majority still sees them as a badge of engineering excellence and firmly believe that people working there are way above average. I don't think that's the case anymore despite the huge amount of associated koolaid. This product is a typical example of Google using their brand name to get a product out that otherwise nobody would even look at.
- billyggruff 8y agoThis is an excellent observation about white-labeling.
- gomox 8y agoIf they get interview scheduling integrations right they are already better than 99% of everything else out there.
- egberts1 8y agoThe Google Applicant tracking system is most hostile toward deaf job applicants, EVAH!
- neil_s 8y agoHow so?
- bradleyjg 8y agoOther posters seem to have concerns about google siphoning data from this product. I wouldn’t be especially worried about that. A much bigger concern for me would be that this product is not and will never be core to google’s business. Will it be around a year from now? Will be around but utterly neglected as whatever opaque process inside google causes it to lose interest in yet another project? I’d rather buy recruiting software from a company in the recruiting software business.
- gowld 8y agoThis looks like a bonus freebie for gsuite users who up til now didn't care to use any applicant tracking service.
- metafizikal 8y agoWhich is a bit weird because the main buyer of G Suite is a CIO, and presumably its Finance/Payroll/HR making the final decision on the hiring software.
- zitterbewegung 8y agoI have always thought that Google generally siphons data from the product and once they have enough of the data that they need then the project they shut it down.
- clubm8 8y ago>* I have always thought that Google generally siphons data from the product and once they have enough of the data that they need then the project they shut it down. * Or if the tool competes with another. I think Reader was killed mainly because it competed with Google Plus. In general, I've noticed many sites now lack RSS feeds - probably because it's better to have users perpetually engaged than give a definitive list of articles that can be read in 1 go.
- icebraining 8y ago
- gaius 8y agoA candidate's CV contains all sorts of personal data, their detailed work and academic history, their contact details and work eligibility, maybe their date of birth, address and personal interests. And it's being served up to Google on a silver plate by this service! This is obviously a blatant attempt to enrich their (shadow) profiles on people.
- expertentipp 8y agoThey failed miserably in the social networking domain, still trying their best to collect complete detailed self-declared personal profiles.
- shady-lady 8y agoa testimonial from that page: > Scheduling interviews used to take a long time, but now it takes just a few clicks The software must be pretty basic if that's a featured quote. What were the deciding factors for who they reach out to for these quotes? If that's one of the better answers, my respect for HR people has sunk to a new low.
- amitutk 8y agoI wanted to purchase subscription to Google Hire. I literally had the credit card in my hand. But there was no way to pay. Not even a way to sign up for a free trial right away. I called them several times, no response. More than a month later, someone finally responded. The person sounded like he is doing me a favor by getting back. In the meantime I started using another ATS that worked well for us. The salesperson response was effectively, "duh ... we are Google". I see they have the pricing online now: https://hire.google.com/request-demo/ https://hire.google.com/request-demo/. But still no way to pay or sign up for a trial right away.
- mygo 8y agoThey must not really want the people at large to use it. Maybe it’s part of some other bigger discussion they’re having. Maybe as part of the pitch to get a government contract. “If you give us the contract, we have a hiring tool that the stakeholders can use”.
- sgarg26 8y agoThe value google may see would be in building machine learning models from data we manually feed in for them. What was the name of the ATS that you eventually selected?
- doh 8y agoI signed up to see what it looks like. I immediately received this email Thank you so much for your interest in Hire by Google. Here's [0] a short video demo to see Hire in action. For more in-depth info on Hire features, check out our YouTube channel [1]. You can also sign up for a live Hire demo webinar here. [2] An annual license for Hire is just $100/month for companies with less than 25 employees, and $200/month for companies with 26-50 employees. If you're ready to move forward, just reply to this email and I'll be happy to send you an order form to add Hire to your G Suite account. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions. Looking forward to hearing from you soon! PS - If you are larger than 50 employees let me know and we can provide a quote. [0] https://info.hire.bebop.co/Introduction-to-Hire.html https://info.hire.bebop.co/Introduction-to-Hire.html [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs0N4b7N8wLY6_4ZHar70Cg/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs0N4b7N8wLY6_4ZHar70Cg/vid... [2] https://info.hire.bebop.co/HireWebinarSeries.html https://info.hire.bebop.co/HireWebinarSeries.html
- throw2016 8y agoThis is a negative business model and should be subject to anti-trust. It's another ruse to hoover up more data by Google. How are software companies going to compete with a google subsidized alternative? Tomorrow google could attack other software verticals with their vampire data collection business model with negative dystopian externalities for society, businesses and their employees. Who is going to pay for all the software employees made redundant by these kinds of business models? This is a kind of dumping which is illegal in most economic systems.
- jsnell 8y agoYou consider selling software for a monthly fee (with the price starting at $100/month) to be a negative business model? Just how much do you think the price should have been to not count as "subsidized"?
- samfisher83 8y agoIs all your data private or google using all the data. It doesn't seem explicit on the feature page.
- neil_s 8y agoSo much FUD about Google collecting "data" in this thread, from people who think data is just automatically equivalent to heaps of money. This is a paid software product for businesses, which makes Google money and has a strict data usage policy saying "G Suite customers own their data, not Google. The data that G Suite organizations and users put into our systems is theirs, and we do not scan it for advertisements nor sell it to third parties." https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-whitepaper/page-6.html https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white... Disclaimer: I do work at El Goog, but not on this product. I just find the vague wolf-crying annoying.
- antsar 8y agoWhat about scanning it not for advertising? Like, say, ML training (as speculated elsewhere in this thread)? Seems like that statement could’ve been much stronger if Google actually meant that.
- neil_s 8y agoSeriously, the page I've linked to is 2 paragraphs, just read it. It explicitly states that data IS used for ML training, to provide useful features to the customers: "Google indexes customer data to provide beneficial services, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spellcheck and the ability to search for emails and files within an individual account." Individual customer agreements may have more specifications on top, but I don't think any rational company in the world would ask for email without spam filtering because of some abstract fear of machine learning or "scanning" of data.
- vzaliva 8y agoThe pricing is wrong. It is based on the size of the company. It should be based on the number of candidates/resumes in pipeline.
- xae342 8y agoThey used to not even offer a demo, and on the phone they were pretty glib about paying for a year to try it out. The fatal flaw was that since it’s not part of an HRMS system it’s not integrated into the whole employee lifecycle, so other solutions made more sense. We went with BambooHR which also has ATS along with everything else you need and was pretty cheap.
- jiveturkey 8y agohow did this make it onto HN? for some privacy bashing? srsly, why is this interesting in the slightest?
- foobaw 8y agoGiven that there are dominating ATS products like Lever, Greenhouse, etc, this will likely just quietly shut-down in a few years.
- sqln00b 8y agoI'm looking for the counterpart: An offer/application/headhunter/company tracking system
- lgleason 8y agoWe need to break up Google ASAP.