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It's hard to know what happened here without knowing the company and the internals - I know for Google, for the hiring committees I'm aware of (I'm a PM hiring

It's hard to know what happened here without knowing the company and the internals - I know for Google, for the hiring committees I'm aware of (I'm a PM hiring committee member), we cant' even easily see where the candidate is based vs. where the role is based, and it's not something we take into account. We don't care, we just want to say whether the candidate passed the bar to work at Google, and from there it's between them and whatever team they're joining. Now, there are other places where problems can arise. For example most (all?) hires go to a VP-level review, which is mostly a rubber stamp for more junior levels, but I have seen a few cases where a VP steps in with concerns about a candidate, and potentially that's what happened here - the hiring manager didn't have buy-in up the chain for the role location, and it got flagged at some point. I'll also throw out there that maybe the recruiter was not wholly truthful, from the perspective that perhaps there was some other problem, either concerns around passing the hiring committee or negative internal references, and the recruiter told you that the remote was the issue instead. I haven't seen a recruiter be directly untruthful, but I have seen situations where the recruiter represented things slightly differently in order to try to keep the candidate's morale up. As an example, I once got asked to do an interview redo for a candidate - this happens from time to time, either because an interview had to get cut short, or the candidate did really poorly and they want to give them another chance, or the interviewer left the company, but they don't tell you the situation when they ask you to re-interview so as not to bias you. When I spoke to the candidate, they said they'd been told something about the interviewer leaving bad notes and transferring orgs, so they had to redo it - I redid the interview, filed my feedback, and later found out that actually the candidate had bombed the previous interview, so much so that the hiring committee felt like it was an outlier and requested a re-interview. Again, this is just from my narrow window on one company, but I wanted to share some of the dynamics at at least one company in the FAANG space.

eitally 5y ago
Also at Google, and my impression is that during the role posting exercise when the hiring manager is first talking with their recruiter, the recruiter asks which locations are acceptable, and "remote" is an option. Often the hiring manager will say, essentially, "I don't care" because they don't want to artificially restrict their candidate pipeline due to location preference. Then, once finalist candidates are in/through interviews, the rubber hits the road and the hiring manager realizes they probably actually do have location preference, and pulls the rug out from beneath the candidate(s). What seems like a small detail on the Google side is likely not appreciated for its enormity on the candidate's side, imho. As a hiring manager and frequent interviewer for other teams, this is my somewhat informed opinion of at least one likely root cause.
nineplay 5y ago
In the off chance you're open to feedback... I don't understand why the hiring committee had to be the last step in a months long process. If I'd gotten though the 5 grueling interviews and heard a "no", that would have been fine - these things happen. Instead, my last interview was in Jan and I got bounced by the hiring committee in March. I know that I was naïve, but I thought I must be set. I though the hiring committee was going to look for red flags but other than that, they'd say yes. Why drag me through all that process and all that stress just to have some faceless committee reject me with no feedback and no explanation? Why not figure out if I'm a good fit before or during the interview process? At the risk of sounding dramatic, it was cruel. It felt like a romantic relationship where everything is going great and then you get a call that says "Sorry, bye, don't call me again".
- mattzito 5y ago
  I am very open to feedback, thank you for sharing your thoughts. As a quick note just as a reminder, I'm on the PM side of things, so I don't have ANY influence on SWE hiring, and things might not work the same way over there. With that caveat: Last interview in Jan and hiring committee in March is a terrible experience, and I'm sorry you had to deal with that. When I notice a packet where the interviews were more than a month prior to my seeing them in committee, I ask why, because it's a bad experience. The reasons I have seen that happen are: - The interview feedback was mixed, and the recruiter wants to go line up a hiring manager to write a statement of support to the committee to help make the case, and that can take time. - The hiring manager who was already attached has to pause hiring, or is in final talks with another candidate, or goes on leave, and something gets dropped for a while I'm sure there are others, but those are the big ones. BTW, neither of those are acceptable reasons for things to have gone the way they did for you, I'm just sharing how I have seen it happen. I'm not sure if you team matched before or after your interviews - at least at Google, they mostly used to team match after interviews and hiring committees, and are now pivoting to team matching BEFORE interviews, partially to avoid experiences like you describe. If a hiring manager is interested and engaged and supportive upfront, they can help push and move things along. In addition, if interview feedback is universally positive, they're looking at skipping hiring commmittee entirely, or doing a lighter review in the interest of speed. In general, I think these are positive changes that hopefully will streamline things, but it's new and we will have to see. One point I do want to address is that hiring committees, at least at Google, are not rubber stamps or sanity checks before hiring - we are expected to carefully review each interview against the assessment rubrics, read the notes, ask follow up questions of the interviewers as necessary, privately vote, and then jointly come to a consensus on our recommendation. Of the packets themselves, those are largely negative don't even go to hiring committee, so we only see the ones where there's at least mixed positive and negative feedback or better. I would estimate that perhaps 10% of the packets I see are "hire" or "strong hire" across the board, and those are the ones where it's a quick sanity check to make sure that nothing unusual happened (e.g. one interviewer was the hiring manager and two others were people who report to the hiring manager). Those are easy, it's great, but it's the exception. Most packets are a mix of positive and negative feedback, because people are people and conversations are hard, and you're trying to remove as much bias as possible, but stuff happens. Maybe the interviewer wanted a particular answer they didn't get, or maybe there was a misunderstanding, or maybe the candidate got flustered. So when someone says "TC did poorly on this dimension", you look at the notes to see if you also see that, you try to interpret whether something else might have been going on, and then you go look in the other interviews to see if maybe signs of that dimension show up there, positive or negative. Positive? Maybe it was a bad discussion, and you can focus on the other positive signals in the other interviews. Negative? Seems like maybe this is a gap in the candidate's skills. I'm absolutely not trying to defend your experience, because it's indefensible, and I try to raise a stink when I see it happen (which is not that often). But I wanted to add some context about the role of the hiring committee and the work that goes into making those determinations.

eitally 5y ago

Also at Google, and my impression is that during the role posting exercise when the hiring manager is first talking with their recruiter, the recruiter asks which locations are acceptable, and "remote" is an option. Often the hiring manager will say, essentially, "I don't care" because they don't want to artificially restrict their candidate pipeline due to location preference. Then, once finalist candidates are in/through interviews, the rubber hits the road and the hiring manager realizes they probably actually do have location preference, and pulls the rug out from beneath the candidate(s). What seems like a small detail on the Google side is likely not appreciated for its enormity on the candidate's side, imho. As a hiring manager and frequent interviewer for other teams, this is my somewhat informed opinion of at least one likely root cause.

nineplay 5y ago

In the off chance you're open to feedback... I don't understand why the hiring committee had to be the last step in a months long process. If I'd gotten though the 5 grueling interviews and heard a "no", that would have been fine - these things happen. Instead, my last interview was in Jan and I got bounced by the hiring committee in March. I know that I was naïve, but I thought I must be set. I though the hiring committee was going to look for red flags but other than that, they'd say yes. Why drag me through all that process and all that stress just to have some faceless committee reject me with no feedback and no explanation? Why not figure out if I'm a good fit before or during the interview process? At the risk of sounding dramatic, it was cruel. It felt like a romantic relationship where everything is going great and then you get a call that says "Sorry, bye, don't call me again".

mattzito 5y ago
I am very open to feedback, thank you for sharing your thoughts. As a quick note just as a reminder, I'm on the PM side of things, so I don't have ANY influence on SWE hiring, and things might not work the same way over there. With that caveat: Last interview in Jan and hiring committee in March is a terrible experience, and I'm sorry you had to deal with that. When I notice a packet where the interviews were more than a month prior to my seeing them in committee, I ask why, because it's a bad experience. The reasons I have seen that happen are: - The interview feedback was mixed, and the recruiter wants to go line up a hiring manager to write a statement of support to the committee to help make the case, and that can take time. - The hiring manager who was already attached has to pause hiring, or is in final talks with another candidate, or goes on leave, and something gets dropped for a while I'm sure there are others, but those are the big ones. BTW, neither of those are acceptable reasons for things to have gone the way they did for you, I'm just sharing how I have seen it happen. I'm not sure if you team matched before or after your interviews - at least at Google, they mostly used to team match after interviews and hiring committees, and are now pivoting to team matching BEFORE interviews, partially to avoid experiences like you describe. If a hiring manager is interested and engaged and supportive upfront, they can help push and move things along. In addition, if interview feedback is universally positive, they're looking at skipping hiring commmittee entirely, or doing a lighter review in the interest of speed. In general, I think these are positive changes that hopefully will streamline things, but it's new and we will have to see. One point I do want to address is that hiring committees, at least at Google, are not rubber stamps or sanity checks before hiring - we are expected to carefully review each interview against the assessment rubrics, read the notes, ask follow up questions of the interviewers as necessary, privately vote, and then jointly come to a consensus on our recommendation. Of the packets themselves, those are largely negative don't even go to hiring committee, so we only see the ones where there's at least mixed positive and negative feedback or better. I would estimate that perhaps 10% of the packets I see are "hire" or "strong hire" across the board, and those are the ones where it's a quick sanity check to make sure that nothing unusual happened (e.g. one interviewer was the hiring manager and two others were people who report to the hiring manager). Those are easy, it's great, but it's the exception. Most packets are a mix of positive and negative feedback, because people are people and conversations are hard, and you're trying to remove as much bias as possible, but stuff happens. Maybe the interviewer wanted a particular answer they didn't get, or maybe there was a misunderstanding, or maybe the candidate got flustered. So when someone says "TC did poorly on this dimension", you look at the notes to see if you also see that, you try to interpret whether something else might have been going on, and then you go look in the other interviews to see if maybe signs of that dimension show up there, positive or negative. Positive? Maybe it was a bad discussion, and you can focus on the other positive signals in the other interviews. Negative? Seems like maybe this is a gap in the candidate's skills. I'm absolutely not trying to defend your experience, because it's indefensible, and I try to raise a stink when I see it happen (which is not that often). But I wanted to add some context about the role of the hiring committee and the work that goes into making those determinations.