It seems that almost everyone here knows better than Google how to hire employees for Google. Given that you can see why it is trivial to see through hours-long hiring committee decisions in just two seconds.

Edit: as pointed out by others, the hiring decision probably does not take a few hours, but under an hour. Still, the point is valid.

I'm pretty sure the hiring committees do not actually deliberate for hours on one candidate. Maybe in very rare cases.

The most i've deliberated was 45-50 minutes on a single candidate in HC itself. (often hours are spent reading packets and preparing notes before HC)

It's not because candidates aren't worth it, it's that if you can't come to consensus in that time period, you are unlikely to be able to :)

Don't be silly. As hedbo says, it's obvious google just doesn't know what they are doing.

If their goal is hiring from industry, as opposed to from schools, I think I could credibly defend an argument that they don't.

(I think what they do now makes sense if they want the top of their funnel to be comprised mostly of recent CS grads, and I think that industry people with really high profiles, or that internal people really want, get to skip a lot of this evaluation.)

I have a lot of respect for Google (how could you not). That doesn't mean they can't be a bit clownshoes with recruiting.

"If their goal is hiring from industry, as opposed to from schools, I think I could credibly defend an argument that they don't. "

I would agree ... if they were actually having trouble hiring from industry.

IE despite everything everyone ever writes here, google simply isn't having trouble attracting enough of the right people that they want to hire (despite arguments to the contrary that they aren't hiring the right people or whatever).

So i can't see an argument that they do it wrong as long as it's actually working.

I expect, if it's truly broken, at some point they will, but

I can't give you anything more than anecdotal responses to this, but Google is (a) missing (ie, failing to hire) specific excellent people in the industry, (b) cultivating a reputation that prevents people from considering them. There are bright spots, but my perception is that they work by circumventing/overriding the standard Google "backrub tickets for calibrated interviewer favors" process.

But yeah, I may not have been clear enough before: I do believe that what Google is doing is working for Google.

About the worst thing you can say for Google's recruiting as a business process is that it's somewhat inhumane, and pollutes the industry with faulty evidence (there appears to be a small cottage industry of consulting "porting" Google's recruiting process to other companies). But I mean, look at the rest of Startuplandia and Google's sins pale in comparison.

answer: it wasn't, cause it's never just 1 reason.