So, amusingly, my referral hit rate at Google is like 1/10. Worse, I only refer people if they've told me that they're certain they wish to go through the terrible process.
When I say 1/10, I don't mean 10%, I mean I have entered about 10, and only one got an offer. In my opinion, all were qualified and should have been given offers. For comparison, I've done roughly 100 interviews or something (though not nearly enough SWE interviews, because I'm in San Francisco). As an additional upwards bias, I actively discourage people from applying, so this is only the folks that said "I understand, refer me anyway".
All that said, Google is really more like dozens of independent companies now. There's Search/Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Photos, Android, Maps/"Geo", and so on. Your mileage will vary pretty drastically depending on how you're routed. Just like Dan was misdirected towards a software interview, I've had friends tossed into the SRE hiring pipeline, asked how to operate large-scale distributed systems and so on, when their background is "Umm, I just did my PhD in CS in Graphics... I've never written a networked program in my life".
To all the other Google employees: find the job posting internally that your friends would actually want, talk to the hiring manager to figure out what that maps to externally on the job postings page (it often doesn't), and then tell the assigned recruiter that you're serious about your recommendation. The recruiter may still override you in deference to their hiring targets / goals though (the one offer I've seen from my referral went this way despite my effort), so don't promise your friends that you can fix it for them.
I'm not here to excuse these hiring practices. Instead, be honest with yourself about why you want to apply, and how much hassle you're willing to put up with. In my experience, all other companies will decide more quickly on your hiring result, role, level, compensation and so on. I believe that's because of the scale of the interviewing and hiring (>10k full-time employees per year for the last few years), except it's always been pretty bad at Google.
When I say 1/10, I don't mean 10%, I mean I have entered about 10, and only one got an offer. In my opinion, all were qualified and should have been given offers. For comparison, I've done roughly 100 interviews or something (though not nearly enough SWE interviews, because I'm in San Francisco). As an additional upwards bias, I actively discourage people from applying, so this is only the folks that said "I understand, refer me anyway".
All that said, Google is really more like dozens of independent companies now. There's Search/Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Photos, Android, Maps/"Geo", and so on. Your mileage will vary pretty drastically depending on how you're routed. Just like Dan was misdirected towards a software interview, I've had friends tossed into the SRE hiring pipeline, asked how to operate large-scale distributed systems and so on, when their background is "Umm, I just did my PhD in CS in Graphics... I've never written a networked program in my life".
To all the other Google employees: find the job posting internally that your friends would actually want, talk to the hiring manager to figure out what that maps to externally on the job postings page (it often doesn't), and then tell the assigned recruiter that you're serious about your recommendation. The recruiter may still override you in deference to their hiring targets / goals though (the one offer I've seen from my referral went this way despite my effort), so don't promise your friends that you can fix it for them.
I'm not here to excuse these hiring practices. Instead, be honest with yourself about why you want to apply, and how much hassle you're willing to put up with. In my experience, all other companies will decide more quickly on your hiring result, role, level, compensation and so on. I believe that's because of the scale of the interviewing and hiring (>10k full-time employees per year for the last few years), except it's always been pretty bad at Google.