5 ms·

Google recruiter: Company kept 'do not touch' in hiring list

28 points by johns 17y ago

brk 17y ago
Article URL appears borked. This one should work though: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12514244?nclick_check=1&forced=true http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12514244?nclick_check=1&fo...
- tlb 17y ago
  Changed in posting
ars 17y ago
Article mixes up two things. I can understand if google won't recruit from certain companies. It's totally different if they refuse to hire someone who sends their resume (without having being recruited). The article mixes up these two concepts.
- mahmud 17y ago
  The filter is applied to resumes in the queue, regardless of the origination/sourcing method used to obtain the resume in the first place. Therefore I think they're discriminating against applicants who submitted their resume to google.
  - duskwuff 17y ago
    Is it? The article didn't give me that impression - all I got was the sense that Google's recruiters were discouraged from seeking employees from these companies.
- pchristensen 17y ago
  "a 'do not touch' list of companies ... whose employees were not to be wooed to the Internet search giant" Recruiters at Google were not to seek out people from these companies. People that worked there were free to apply to Google without repercussion.
jerf 17y ago
I'm a little unclear on why this is worth federal time. If the companies were colluding to not hire people from the various companies, this would make sense. If your resume got tossed simply because it showed "Google" or "Google Partner X", I can see how that's bad; the net effect is to destroy the job market on the employee side. But how is it wrong to choose to not actively recruit from your partners, or even your competition? Is the solution really to mandate headhunting certain companies? These are questions. I don't know the answers. If I seem to have something wrong, please let me know; I'm posting this out of confusion.
- mahmud 17y ago
  If the companies were colluding to not hire people from the various companies, this would make sense That's a hiring discrimination. What about the right to employment for a qualified, top-notch information retrieval candidate?
  - byrneseyeview 17y ago
    What about the right to employment for a qualified, top-notch information retrieval candidate? A "right to employment" only exists when nobody with the means to employ someone has any right to their own property.
    - ardit33 17y ago
      dude you sound like those people 30 years ago protecting discrimination against certain races/classes: "It is my property, i don't want to rent it to Black/Asian/whatever race you don't like." Sorry, discrimination is discrimination, and discriminating somebody just b/c they worked on a company x, in a very systematic way (and colluding with other companies on this), seems very anti-competitive. At the end, is the employees that suffer b/c there is less competition for their skills.
      - randallsquared 17y ago
        Trying to turn "people have a right to control what's theirs" into something you can't say? :)
ig1 17y ago
Every partnership agreement I've worked under for a large company has had a "no employee theft" clause. I don't think they're uncommon.
- ajju 17y ago
  Those require that if YOU move, you won't recruit your colleagues or people who work for you. This was a company wide policy at Google that prevented their own recruiters from hiring from certain companies. Big difference.
ATB 17y ago
So far, I don't see a lot of people asking the really tough questions of what this non-competition for employees (especially engineers / developers) actually means. * If some of the top companies are implicitly not competing for you (as an employee), it means your value as an asset is lowered. There is simply less desire for another company to lure you away with more money, better benefits, a more attractive project to work on, etc. Once you work at one of the companies "on the list," none of the others will come knocking. Your value is also lowered in terms of being able to negotiate a better salary, for instance: HR (and perhaps your manager) knows that you do not have an offer from Yahoo or Google just waiting to whisk you away. * The basic effect on general engineers' salaries is thus: the less it costs Google/MS to hire a Silicon Valley A-lister, the less incentive they will feel to look for bargains by hiring outside the circle of "made men". Thus they will hire fewer such relative-newcomers, at lower salaries. Thus there will be less upward pressure on non-Silicon-Valley-A-list salaries: fewer engineers will leave the broader pool for Silicon Valley and those that do will be receiving less money to do so, so the competitive pressures on the non-SV-A-list employers are weakened too. So less salary for SDEs broadly. This knock-on effect is likely minimal for junior ASP.NET bank programmers etc. but likely significant for hotter engineers at more high-powered dev/research/etc. workplaces throughout the US. * Because certain kinds of employees' labour mobility is lowered, it means that access to engineers is somewhat more limited. Your company may not be able to get the rockstar/ninja/hip term of the week who already knows the valley, doesn't need to relocate, and just wants to pay off his SF condo more quickly. Inversely, you may not want to compete for top graduates from places like Stanford with the 90k/100k first year salaries that Facebook and some others have been throwing around. This means you can either get second-tier native talent that may need relocating or that hasn't proven itself yet ... or you can play the H1 visa game and get a much cheaper foreign programmer who is contractually tied to your company, often fears for his immigrant status, and is thereby much less likely to leave your company for another one. This is a bad thing for US graduates or relatively inexperienced programmers, as it depresses their salaries, as well. In terms of the free market, I guess it's only a natural expression of international labour mobility. * The lack of commentary on the above may be due to the current economic conditions and the "thank $DEITY I still have a job" attitude I've seen quite a bit. On the other hand, we got plenty of people on here with the kind of inside knowledge who would be able to tell us more on this subject.

28 points by johns 17y ago

brk 17y ago

Article URL appears borked. This one should work though: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12514244?nclick_check=1&forced=true http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12514244?nclick_check=1&fo...

tlb 17y ago
Changed in posting

ars 17y ago

Article mixes up two things. I can understand if google won't recruit from certain companies. It's totally different if they refuse to hire someone who sends their resume (without having being recruited). The article mixes up these two concepts.

mahmud 17y ago
The filter is applied to resumes in the queue, regardless of the origination/sourcing method used to obtain the resume in the first place. Therefore I think they're discriminating against applicants who submitted their resume to google.
- duskwuff 17y ago
  Is it? The article didn't give me that impression - all I got was the sense that Google's recruiters were discouraged from seeking employees from these companies.
pchristensen 17y ago
"a 'do not touch' list of companies ... whose employees were not to be wooed to the Internet search giant" Recruiters at Google were not to seek out people from these companies. People that worked there were free to apply to Google without repercussion.

jerf 17y ago

I'm a little unclear on why this is worth federal time. If the companies were colluding to not hire people from the various companies, this would make sense. If your resume got tossed simply because it showed "Google" or "Google Partner X", I can see how that's bad; the net effect is to destroy the job market on the employee side. But how is it wrong to choose to not actively recruit from your partners, or even your competition? Is the solution really to mandate headhunting certain companies? These are questions. I don't know the answers. If I seem to have something wrong, please let me know; I'm posting this out of confusion.

mahmud 17y ago
If the companies were colluding to not hire people from the various companies, this would make sense That's a hiring discrimination. What about the right to employment for a qualified, top-notch information retrieval candidate?
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  What about the right to employment for a qualified, top-notch information retrieval candidate? A "right to employment" only exists when nobody with the means to employ someone has any right to their own property.
  - ardit33 17y ago
    dude you sound like those people 30 years ago protecting discrimination against certain races/classes: "It is my property, i don't want to rent it to Black/Asian/whatever race you don't like." Sorry, discrimination is discrimination, and discriminating somebody just b/c they worked on a company x, in a very systematic way (and colluding with other companies on this), seems very anti-competitive. At the end, is the employees that suffer b/c there is less competition for their skills.
    - randallsquared 17y ago
      Trying to turn "people have a right to control what's theirs" into something you can't say? :)

ig1 17y ago

Every partnership agreement I've worked under for a large company has had a "no employee theft" clause. I don't think they're uncommon.

ajju 17y ago
Those require that if YOU move, you won't recruit your colleagues or people who work for you. This was a company wide policy at Google that prevented their own recruiters from hiring from certain companies. Big difference.

ATB 17y ago

So far, I don't see a lot of people asking the really tough questions of what this non-competition for employees (especially engineers / developers) actually means. * If some of the top companies are implicitly not competing for you (as an employee), it means your value as an asset is lowered. There is simply less desire for another company to lure you away with more money, better benefits, a more attractive project to work on, etc. Once you work at one of the companies "on the list," none of the others will come knocking. Your value is also lowered in terms of being able to negotiate a better salary, for instance: HR (and perhaps your manager) knows that you do not have an offer from Yahoo or Google just waiting to whisk you away. * The basic effect on general engineers' salaries is thus: the less it costs Google/MS to hire a Silicon Valley A-lister, the less incentive they will feel to look for bargains by hiring outside the circle of "made men". Thus they will hire fewer such relative-newcomers, at lower salaries. Thus there will be less upward pressure on non-Silicon-Valley-A-list salaries: fewer engineers will leave the broader pool for Silicon Valley and those that do will be receiving less money to do so, so the competitive pressures on the non-SV-A-list employers are weakened too. So less salary for SDEs broadly. This knock-on effect is likely minimal for junior ASP.NET bank programmers etc. but likely significant for hotter engineers at more high-powered dev/research/etc. workplaces throughout the US. * Because certain kinds of employees' labour mobility is lowered, it means that access to engineers is somewhat more limited. Your company may not be able to get the rockstar/ninja/hip term of the week who already knows the valley, doesn't need to relocate, and just wants to pay off his SF condo more quickly. Inversely, you may not want to compete for top graduates from places like Stanford with the 90k/100k first year salaries that Facebook and some others have been throwing around. This means you can either get second-tier native talent that may need relocating or that hasn't proven itself yet ... or you can play the H1 visa game and get a much cheaper foreign programmer who is contractually tied to your company, often fears for his immigrant status, and is thereby much less likely to leave your company for another one. This is a bad thing for US graduates or relatively inexperienced programmers, as it depresses their salaries, as well. In terms of the free market, I guess it's only a natural expression of international labour mobility. * The lack of commentary on the above may be due to the current economic conditions and the "thank $DEITY I still have a job" attitude I've seen quite a bit. On the other hand, we got plenty of people on here with the kind of inside knowledge who would be able to tell us more on this subject.