How To Interview At Google

Tip : Implicitly Show Your Googleyness

How to: Work at Google Example Coding/Engineering Interview

To prepare your stories, compare your past experiences with Google traits, along with personal values youre most proud of, and select the stories best reflecting those traits and values. You want to show that your values and experiences perfectly match what recruiters look for.

So what are these famous Google traits? Above all, Google places emphasis on kindness, empathy, and humility in their people. Successful candidates also excel in these criteria: learning ability, teamwork, communication skills, leadership.

Learning ability: Google not only values excellent cognitive abilities, but also problem-solving ability, curiosity, and ability to learn.
Teamwork: Working at Google demands that youre a great team player. Merely being an independent, hard-working employee isnt going to cut it youve got to work, think, and succeed in teams.
Communication skills: succeeding in teams also requires excellent communication skills, and this holds true not only for Google but many companies.
Leadership: Google defines leadership as the willingness to step into a difficult problem and step out when their expertise is not needed. One person is not always going to be the right leader for everything Google does work will be handled in small-sized teams consisting of people with different skill sets.

Schedule And Confirm The Interview

Use a scheduler.

To be sure that you’re on the same page for the interview time, use scheduling apps like Google Calendar or Calendly. This is especially important if you and the interviewee are living in different time zones.

Confirm the remote interview.

Be sure that your candidate knows it’s going to be a remote interview, and that they have access to the internet on a computer or phone that has a microphone and video.

How To Use It

Everything below is an outline, and you should tackle the items in order from top to bottom.

I’m using Github’s special markdown flavor, including tasks lists to check progress.

Create a new branch so you can check items like this, just put an x in the brackets:

Fork a branch and follow the commands below

git checkout -b progress

git remote add jwasham https://github.com/jwasham/google-interview-university

git fetch –all

git add .

git commit -m “Marked x”

git rebase jwasham/master

You’ll see some C, C++, and Python learning included below, because I’m learning. There are a few books involved, see the bottom.

Five Steps Of The Google Recruitment Process

Googles recruitment process consists of five main parts: resume screening, phone screenings, on-site interviews, hiring committee reviews, and executive reviews. While each part of the hiring process has its own value, the most difficult and decisive parts are phone screenings , and on-site interviews . These interviews last 45 minutes on average, with pass rates ranging from 15% to 20%.

Also Check: How To Prepare For A Special Education Teacher Interview

Three Tips To Ace Google Interviews

The beginning of every interview at Google will involve 15-20 minutes of behavioural questions. Hence, its crucial that you present yourself in a consistent, thorough manner. Most importantly, however, you must demonstrate the traits that Google looks for in every answer. Below, Ive summarised three tips to help you ace every fit interview question, keep reading!

Does It Work For Other Companies

Google undoubtedly has the most standard interview process and most tech companies have borrowed similar ideas. As a result, this guide is applicable for most top companies like Facebook, Uber, Dropbox, Amazon, Airbnb and so on so forth.

Of course, different companies have its own focuses like culture fit. But the most important and basic requirements like data structures/algorithms and system design are same everywhere .

Some small startups might have a completely unique interview process, which wont be covered in this resource. For example, some companies will ask the candidate to finish a project over the weekend.

Getting Noticed By Google

Google receives more than two million resumes but hires only around 4000 employees every year so its not easy to get noticed by recruiters for interview calls. Take the referrals through some connections working in these companies or you can take the help of LinkedIn and online coding platforms to increase your chances for interview calls. Below are some points that will help you in getting the call for interviews

Try to make a single-page resume and include only relevant things. Make it short, precise because none of the recruiters has more than 15 seconds to scan a CV. Write down only those things you are comfortable with, do not fake anything because the interviewer can spot that easily during the interview. If you are mentioning your project then mention the complexity of your project as well. Check the link Resume Building Resources and Tips for the guidelines to prepare your CV.

You can participate in or which is a coding competition hosted by Google. If you reach Round 2 in Google Code Jam, you might be contacted by Google.

Keep your Linkedin, Github and other profiles updated, hiring managers uses these tools like LinkedIn, alumni databases, and professional associations to find out suitable candidate.

Preparing For The Google Interview

Prepare for Your Google Interview: Leadership

In order to improve your chances of acing the Google interview, and to prevent you from having to spend another 6-months waiting to reapply, you should definitely stack the odds in your favor and prepare.

But how do you prepare effectively? There is no shortage of websites like HackerRank, LeetCode, ProjectEuler, TopCoder, etc. that serve as technical interviewing problem farms.

Sure, you could spend your time grinding through every single problem on LeetCode, but is the massive time investment really worth it? Is there a more efficient way you could be preparing?

Everyone has a finite amount of time and energy, and therefore using both resources as effectively as possible is an important factor in optimizing for both. Deliberate, consistent, and targeted practice is integral to successfully navigate the Google interview.

Practice With Yourself Or With Peers

A great way to practice answering prioritization questions is to interview yourself out loud. This may sound strange, but its an excellent way to improve the way you communicate your answers during an interview. Play the role of both the candidate and the interviewer, asking questions and answering them, just like two people would in an interview.

If you have friends or peers who can do mock interviews with you, that’s a great option too. This can be especially helpful if your friend has experience with PM interviews, or is at least familiar with the process. You can also find peers to practice with on our new PM mock interview platform.

In addition to practicing by yourself, and with peers, it can be a huge advantage to do mock interviews with experienced PM interviewers.

What About More Senior Roles Are The Interview Questions Different For Senior Software Engineers Or Engineering Managers

Phil says that he generally asks the same set of technical questions to both junior and senior engineers.

With junior engineers, he is looking to see that they can solve problems with some guidance. He would typically give them plenty of hints. What he is looking for is to see that they can take his hints and apply them to the problem.

For senior engineers, he is expecting that they dont require many hints, and the clues given would be more vague and higher level. Here, he would be testing the ability to get to the core of a problem and figure out a reasonable solution.

At Google, Engineering Managers are expected to be very technical. They need to understand their teams work with enough technical depth to contribute code, fix bugs, and be part of design decisions. They have to guide their team, evaluate how their engineers are operating and coach people to perform better.

Phil says that most Engineering Managers are writing some code he tried to spend about 60% of his time writing code during his tenure in the role. It then follows that during interviews, Engineering Manager candidates will be expected to solve problems with code and crack system design problems. Interviewers will often evaluate them like senior engineers.

Also Check: What Is A One Way Interview

Join An Interview Via Google Meet

At the time of the interview, the interviewer and the candidate can join the video conference by clicking the meeting link in the interview invite or calendar event. Generally speaking, the interviewer can admit/deny participant entry to the meeting, and the candidate can request to join the meeting. If they candidate is denied, then can refresh to request again. Neither party can view meeting details.

Please note these experiences might differ based on your organization’s unique Google Meet settings, which are configured through Google.

How Do You Make Sure That You Are Your Colleagues Remain Accountable

Accountability is critical in the eyes of every employer. Google wants to know that youll handle your tasks and hold yourself to a reasonable standard. Additionally, the hiring manager may favor candidates who can also help team members stay accountable, especially if group projects are the norm.

EXAMPLE ANSWER:

For me, accountability is always a priority. One of the key steps I take is to track all of my deliverables and associated due dates. A list allows me to create notifications and block out time on my calendar as necessary, ensuring I can focus on the task and finish on time.

When a project is larger, I also use the mini-milestone approach. This creates an opportunity for me to examine each step along the way, making it easier to chart a course.

As far as when Im working with my colleagues, I find that follow up is often effective. At times, this many involve scheduling team meetings to discuss our progress or transition work between coworkers, or simply reaching out to see if they are on target or if I can offer assistance.

Recommended Reading: How To Perform In Interview

Good Questions To Ask At The End Of A Google Interview

When you are finished answering Google interview questions, you typically get to ask a few yourself. This is a crucial opportunity. Not only will it ensure you can get details that may not have been covered, but it also lets you gauge whether the job is actually right for you.

If you dont know what to ask, here are five good questions for the end of any Google interview:

Is there anything about working for Google that surprised you when you first started?

What is the biggest challenge that Google faces today? How does this role help address that challenge?

What does a typical day look like in this role?

How would you define success for this job?

What do the most successful people in this position have in common?

Google Interview Process + Interview Questions

Every detail about the Google interview process & 100+ interview questions.

Landing one of the most enviable jobs in tech is 26 times harder than getting into Harvard University: Googles acceptance rate is 0.2%, while Harvards is 5.2%.

The search engine giant on-boarded 20,000 new hires in 2019 — shortlisted from over two million applications. Google was poised for similar growth this year, but has cut back on hiring and other nonessential expenditures as it faces an advertising slump from the pandemic.

That said, Googles careers site currently boasts over 1,000 open positions worldwide.

In other good news, Google axed those infamous brain teaser interview questions in 2013 after internal data showed they were a weak predictor of job competency, and served primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.

Now that you know what won’t be asked, let’s talk a little more about what will. This guide will answer all your burning questions about Google’s interview process, and what you can do to prepare.

Try it out:

Example Prioritization Question With Answer

Now that you know how to approach prioritization questions, lets look at a full example.

Try this question:

If you have projects A, B, and C, how do you prioritize them?

Of course, in the interview youll have more specific details than A, B, and C, so for the purposes of this example well say that the interviewer has given you this hypothetical situation: youre the PM for a brand new photo-editing mobile app. Project A is the aforementioned update to the in-app messaging system, project B is developing a corresponding desktop app, and project C is adding a crop tool to the editing suite.

Step one: Define the business objective

First, you should start by making sure you understand the product properly and agree with your interviewer on specific user and business objectives. Agreeing on the goals upfront is extremely important because your priorities will change depending on what youre trying to achieve with the product.

In this instance, given that weve been informed were the PM for a brand new mobile app, the current business objective could be to drive new user acquisition and engagement. Lets assume that weve run this by the interviewer, and theyve encouraged you to focus on user engagement.

Now that we know what were working toward, lets apply a prioritization framework to our three options.

Step two: RICE Framework – Reach

So here is our breakdown for Reach:Project A: 250Project C: 600

Step three: RICE framework – Impact

Step five: RICE framework – Effort

Is More Really Better

Google Interview – The Process and Basics From a Former Google Recruiter

Historically, Google hiring managers assumed that the more employees they had interview a single job candidate, the better the hiring decision would be.

That meant each applicant might be subject to as many as a dozen interviews.

“Hiring took six to nine months and people sat for 15 to 25 interviews. It was an awful experience,” Humu CEO Laszlo Bock said at back in 2014.

But was that really the way to go? Google wanted to know, and unfortunately, it wasn’t a question.

“Our early People Analytics team decided to look at the data to see how helpful and predictive each interview actually was,” Hiring Innovation Manager Shannon Shaper wrote in Google’s re:Work blog. “The team looked at a subset of our interview data over five years to determine the value of a single interviewer’s feedback.”

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Tip : Prepare Stories Not Questions

For any interview, especially fit interviews, it is best toprepare 3-4 detailed, all-round, refined stories exhibiting all the required attributes . This way, you can tune the stories according to the interviewers questions in a flexible, consistent manner.

Many candidatesmake the mistake of preparing on a per-question basis, i.e listing out the possible questions and the corresponding answers/stories. Wrapping your head around inflexible answers can throw you off-balance when an unexpected question comes up. The resulting storytelling style is also somewhat robotic.

Instead, in theCase Interview End-to-End Secrets Program, I teach a story-based approach: select a few stories reflecting your best, all-round self, and develop them in detail.

Interviewing At Google Here’s 6 Things You Absolutely Need To Do

Having interviewed, coached, and sat on hiring committees with many candidates during my three year tenure at Google, Ive learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. I conquered the interview process after failing once before and, even then, I thought it could’ve gone either way. With tons of stuff to study, it’s hard to figure out how to prepare. Even really smart people can fail if they dont have a good plan for what to do when they get into the room with an actual software engineer and a whiteboard.

So, I’m going to share six tips I believe you absolutely need to nail your interview. After you check these out, watch this sample interview video conducted by Google engineers.

1. Repeat the question in your own words

As soon as you hear it, repeat it out loud. Do this preferably in your own words to demonstrate your comprehension. Remember, your interviewer is there to assist you, so repeating the question aloud will only serve to make their job easier.

This will also buy you some time to think about what you’ve been asked and develop good questions or approaches. Plus, hearing yourself restate the problem might help you think through it more clearly.

2. Check assumptions

3. Use real examples

If your interviewer provides examples, use those since they probably exist for a reason. This is also how interviewers will point you towards problems with your design or implementation.

4. Brainstorm solutions and their time/space complexity

5. Write working code

Also Check: What To Say During A Phone Interview

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