Woman recruited by Google four times and rejected, joins age-discrimination suit

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2950914/it-careers/woman-recruited-by-google-four-times-and-rejected-joins-suit.html

by mkempe • 11 years ago

73 100 11 years ago

computerworld.com

dudul3• 11 years ago

The title is a little misleading. She was never actually hired, just interviewed.

dudul3• 11 years ago

What's this dumb downvote for? The title said she was recruited and let go 4 times which doesn't make any sense. The actual story is that she was interviewed 4 times and then ignored.

elsherbini• 11 years ago

Maybe the title changed since your comment, but 'recruited and rejected' means exactly that, interviewed and not hired.

mephi5t0• 11 years ago

Down votes are incorrect.

Recruited means enlisted, hired. She was never hired, she was contacted by recruiters and interviewed. "Recruited" doesn't mean "contacted by recruiters" it means hired to do work. Recruiter - who hires/searches for "recruits". Recruit is a person that was recruited not contacted by a recruiter.

informatimago• 11 years ago

Nope. Not according to my understanding, and not according to dictionaries such as the Merriam-Webster:

recruit verb re·cruit \ri-ˈkrüt\

: to find suitable people and get them to join a company, an organization, the armed forces, etc.

: to form or build (a group, team, army, etc.) by getting people to join

: to persuade (someone) to join you in some activity or to help you

"Recruited" definitely means she was hired. She wasn't, she was only interviewed four times and not given a job offer each time.

Check her resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cherylfillekes

chapium• 11 years ago

I would say it is misleading because it misses the entire point of the article. She's part of an age discrimination suit.

mkempe2• 11 years ago

added this qualifier to the title

iza• 11 years ago

So she has good qualifications but poor interview skills.

mkempe2• 11 years ago

After the first interview she was re-contacted by the Google recruiters who told her she had done very well in her interview, and that was why they were contacting her for other positions.

Someone1234• 11 years ago

Maybe. It is very hard to prove one way or another.

The only way to "prove" discrimination is to show a pattern of behaviours rather than isolated incidents. That's what lawsuits like this often hinge upon, they will use discovery to primarily prove that discrimination is occurring.

sosuke• 11 years ago

Seems just strange to keep asking someone you reject to come back. When I am turned away I am turned away no more.

justizin3• 11 years ago

I on multiple occasions have asked Google recruiters to put me on a "leave me the fuck alone" list.

edroche• 11 years ago

Four times does seem excessive, but I have been called back by companies to interview for other positions in the past. I wasn't a fit for some reason in the first instance, but my information was saved and presented again when another opportunity came up that they thought I would be a fit for.

potatolicious4• 11 years ago

Alternatively, she has good qualifications and Google has interview practices or policies that are - intentionally or not - age-discriminatory.

Generally speaking, if well-qualified people are constantly failing your interviews, the problem may not be these well-qualified people and instead might be your interviews ;)

Considering that the typical programming interview in this industry does not involve writing any actual code (no, waving your arms against a whiteboard in a coding-like way doesn't count), I'm generally inclined to believe interviews are more problematic than interviewees.

Ntrails• 11 years ago

Generally speaking, if well-qualified people are constantly failing your interviews, the problem may not be these well-qualified people and instead might be your interviews ;)

Google have [probably] rarely interviewed anyone who was not well qualified - yet around 90% of candidates fail the interview. I am assuming there will be ~10 interviewed candidates per role and they have pre-screening essentially for "qualified on paper".

I've no position on whether they're discriminatory, but that statement simply doesn't hold water.

metamet• 11 years ago

Yup. Happens all the time. You're going to have quite a few candidates who are technically qualified. That's sort of the purpose of interviewing them.

And now she will never get hired by Google after trying to sue them.

logfromblammo• 11 years ago

The reason she joined the lawsuit is because she believed that Google was never going to hire her anyway. So you're sort of implying that she is somehow burning a bridge that was never built.

greenyoda• 11 years ago

"And now she will never get hired by Google after trying to sue them."

I don't think she cares much about working for Google in the future, since she's switched careers and bought a dairy farm.

justizin3• 11 years ago

It's fairly notorious that /Google/ has poor interview skills. A study by their own HR department showed as much.

They have extreme prejudice in favor of attributes that do not impact performance.

collyw• 11 years ago

So does almost everywhere I have interviewed recently. Hour and a half coding test. Why? I never code like that.

richmarr5• 11 years ago

  So she has good qualifications but poor interview skills.

If this is true then Google are hiring wrong.

'Interview skills' is pretty much a euphamism for allowing confidence bias to dominate your interview process.

nickbauman2• 11 years ago

Google's "interview process" is kind of a Valley joke. The only way you get hired at Google is if you're a "tech celebrity" (i.e. Guido van Rossum), you're a freshly minted grad from the likes of MIT and Stanford or you're an acqui-hire. Of course you have to pass the interviews. But there are almost no exceptions.

TallGuyShort2• 11 years ago

The initial phase of recruiting is also somewhat of a joke. I've heard the phrase "they interview anyone with a pulse" repeatedly. My own experience: I have a different recruiter contact me every 6 months, I tell them I'd be very interested in speaking with someone about specific teams / positions at my local office, and then 6 months later I get a call from another recruiter at a completely different office.

Arainach• 11 years ago

This matches my experiences perfectly. Heck, most recently, they contacted me, said they were interested in talking about my experiences, set up a time, and......never called. Nor did they ever email explaining why they didn't call. As if I wasn't already jaded by the experience of myself and several other friends in onsite interview loops, this has done nothing to improve my opinion of them as a company.

bzz01• 11 years ago

Come on, if that was true they would never be able to hire tens of thousands of engineers. They do have high false negative rate (by design) but it is far from impossible to pass. I personally know a ton of people who were hired by Google after standard interview process.

nickbauman2• 11 years ago

Google has upwards of 50k employees. Compare that to IBM: upwards of 500k employees. A friend (and maker and seller of tech companies, so he's quite well connected, much better than I) living in Palo Alto has told me he knows of no one who works at Google in engineering who isn't an acqui-hire.

xigency• 11 years ago

Ah, life at the Chocolate Factory.

JamesBaxter• 11 years ago

I imagine it's possible there is age discrimination at Google but I doubt it contributed in this case. Why would Google have contacted her multiple times if age had been a problem before?

Like the rest of us she's not getting any younger...

vonmoltke5• 11 years ago

Why did Amazon contact me to invite me to a hiring event, only to immediately reject me due to "prior interview feedback"? Sometimes the left hand doesn't talk to the right at these large companies.

alecco2• 11 years ago

Because it's a big organization and recruiters are lazy or out of the loop.

aesthetics1• 11 years ago

It's possible to be contacted by multiple recruiters at the same company, no?

forgottenpass• 11 years ago

Why would Google have contacted her multiple times if age had been a problem before?

Why would Google contact anyone multiple times inf there had been any problems before?

Obviously their process must include some sort of returning to potential recruits, or the recruiter just has no data on the previous attempts to recruit her. If it was the case that age was the reason they chose not to hire her, they know damn well not to write that down.

wobbleblob• 11 years ago

People in the US don't put their age on their resume, and many people past a certain age try to obscure data on the resume that would give their age away. It's illegal to ask in an interview, so perhaps they didn't realize until they saw the candidate in person. I remember reading somewhere the average age of google employees (that's all employees, not new hires) is below 30. A group like that isn't likely to hire someone too old for them to relate to any more than a company with an average age over 50 is going to be interested in hiring a 19 yr old. We can't relate to people of a different age, that's the way it's always been.

Where I live, if your date of birth (and in some cases recent color photograph) isn't on your resume, they'll assume you have something to hide and you'll get no response. Might as well be upfront about it.

alecco2• 11 years ago

Google's gotta fake the H-1B requirements by pretending not to find local people for cheap foreign labor.

shin_lao• 11 years ago

H-1B imposes that the hire has competitive pay.

api2• 11 years ago

That's only part of the story. If you lose your job, you might not be able to stay -- and competitive pay may still be lower than a US candidate.

So who do you want if you're Google? An H1-B with really heavy golden handcuffs, or a US candidate who will rush off and join the latest hot startup next week after they've tagged 'Worked at Google' on their resume?

skynetv2• 11 years ago

I "succeessfully cleared" full interview loops two times and didnt get an offer, didnt get past phone screens two times. recently i got another call from Google and I said

"no, thank you. either i am not a good fit or you are using me to have a reasonable pool of candidates to compare against."

the entire process is very lengthy, slow, often interacting with rude interviewers, with no eta on if an offer will be made and no reasonable explanation on why they did not make an offer. One time the reason I got was "we no longer need to fill that position" after 3 months of interview loop.

wyclif• 11 years ago

They can't provide a "reasonable explanation" for passing on any candidate because of legal issues. No major company that I know of does that for the same reason.

samstave• 11 years ago

Similar thing happened to me.. went through a very lengthy interview process and successfully passed it where they called me the day after and said that they were going to give me an offer the next day! I was ecstatic.

They then called me the next day and said "oh, yeah -- we aren't going to give you an offer" and wouldnt give me a reason.

The next time, they attempted to recruit me for the same position and I went through several days of phone interviews passing each one. Then I said -- "so you know, I interviewed for this position before and was told I would get an offer, but then didnt" they went back and checked and then said "Yeah we wont be continuing the interview process"

Then it happened a third time! Finally I sent the recruiter an email that said "This is the third time you have attempted to recruit me for this position -- Either offer me the job, with a salaray of X or take me out of your system and stop calling me"

They haven't called me since -- and I still have no idea why I am blacklisted.

plonh10• 11 years ago

You told them to stop calling you.... So they stopped calling you.

drubio• 11 years ago

I experienced a very similar broken interview process, but with Amazon (AWS). It appears this is more common at the big tech companies than I thought , judging from your comment and all the others in this thread.

I was contacted three times for the same position, until I also had to tell the recruiter 'no thank you, remove me from all future positions'.

The first time I was scheduled to fly into Seattle, they even asked me what I wanted for lunch! Then 1 week before the flight, they cancelled everything, reason 'none given', just 'we will keep you on file'. A different recruiter contacted me a second time 3 months later, I thought to schedule the Seattle interview, but I was told it was 'a different hiring manager' and I needed to do the phone screens again. So I did, after the phone screens, I was given the canned email 'we cannot extend another interview..'. Then the same recruiter contacts me again a month later to see if I wanted to interview! At which point I just declined.

plonh10• 11 years ago

Amazon does hire for specific positions, so if a manager picked your resume but hired someone else first, you get dropped until another manager picks your resume.

plonh10• 11 years ago

If you are a software engineer, "we no longer need to fill that position" is impossible, because Google uses a general allocation model, not a specific team seat model.

cafard• 11 years ago

The term "Rooney Rule" does come to mind.

vitd2• 11 years ago

Same thing here. It seemed like what they were really after is finding out my current employer's pay scale for engineers with my amount of experience. They never even officially rejected me. I had to call them to find out what the situation was.

zajd• 11 years ago

I can't believe the number of people defending Google in the comments on that article and elsewhere. I'm sorry, but if you actively recruit someone and interview them in person FOUR times but continue to mysteriously deny them something is horrifically wrong with your hiring process. Beyond that, statistics don't lie.

clebio3• 11 years ago

Completely agree. Even if the only thing wrong is, they can't keep track of who they've already interviewed (so they don't call them again), that's pretty sad. You're freakin' Google, and you can keep your decided-against list eventually consistent? Poor form.

plonh10• 11 years ago

"No hire" is not a permanent Scarlet letter. Why is it wrong to take a second chance?

haylem• 11 years ago

I don't know... They interviewed me 5 times, and I don't mind so much. It's a bit frustrating, but I can understand why.

Sure there were a few cases of "oops, didn't realize we interviewed you already" and I'm sure there are cases of "we just don't like you as a person". But I'm pretty sure overall, with Google and most companies, the reason was just "you just weren't good enough compared to our other current candidates." And that's OK.

The fact that they re-interview someone they dismiss is a good thing. The fact that they re-interview N times a person they've dismissed N-1 times is just unfortunate and makes it more visible, but it's not in itself a malevolent thing. Maybe it'd be best if they didn't re-interview at all because it makes them look bad (after all, chances are higher they'll reject you again if they already did). But I guess I prefer the view that they don't want to pass on someone that might have improved, or someone that they might have dismissed for the wrong reasons the first time. And I see that as rather positive.

I personally re-interviewed some people multiple times - and both people I had rejected before and people I had approved but who denied or who got hired but then left and decided to come back. It doesn't struck me as a bad thing to re-assess people based on your current needs and your current workforce. You just have not to be a jerk about it.

I'm sure not everybody shares that view though.

WalterSear• 11 years ago

Sounds like you've never heard how terrible the interview system is at google. Four interviews and no offer doesn't seem at all out of the ordinary. I know more than one person that started refusing google job opportunities due to the bullshit.

Phlow3• 11 years ago

Having just interviewed at Google, with 15+ years of experience, spending 2 months brushing up on algorithms and data structures, of which none were part of my interview, leaving at the end of the day thinking they'd be crazy not to offer me a job, I was rejected. Several 20-something kids interviewed me, and I'm pretty sure I've forgotten more than they know.

I know they're Google and everyone wants to work there, but if their false-negative rate is so high, I'm not going to bother wasting my time. Don't tell me you're interested in me, create a study surface area that takes months to cover, when in reality the chance of being hired is quite small. It's disrespectful and it pisses people off.

migstopheles• 11 years ago

Several 20-something kids interviewed me, and I'm pretty sure I've forgotten more than they know

Not saying you didn't have a bad experience, but it's possible that this kind of attitude didn't help your cause much either...

Phlow3• 11 years ago

I had nothing but good conversations. No animosity at all during the interview. That comment is post-interview analysis.

sssilver• 11 years ago

I know they're Google and everyone wants to work there

If only Google themselves knew how far that is from truth.

plonh10• 11 years ago

You probably got the "he seems smart, but I would expect someone with this much experience to gave progressed farther in his career, no hire because no trajectory , we can't hire someone with 15 years experience at the '7 years of experience' level he interviewed at". For people who are solid contributors and not "management material", this looks a lot like ageism, but technically maybe isn't.

Now, why they want everyone at a 50K engineer company to be management material...seems ill advised.

Phlow3• 11 years ago

Obviously, I have no idea why I was rejected. If that is the case, no part of their interview tests what a lot of solid devs spend tons of their time doing in their career... solving problems. I have debugged countless problems. It's not sexy, not resume material, but it is reality. There are many, many very good devs working in smaller companies who have made a career out of getting things done. If Google isn't interested in people like that, I question that wisdom.

You also can't make a determination about "management material" by simply looking at a resume and seeing "they aren't a manager". Why am I not a manager, though? Because I still love development. It doesn't mean I don't mentor people. It doesn't mean I don't hold a lot of weight in determining how we do things.

I'm not really claiming ageism. I'm in my mid-30's. I'd be surprised if that was it. I do wonder if it's wise having 20-somethings interviewing people though.

clebio3• 11 years ago

That seems like a huge leap to a conclusion with the parent comment doesn't substantiate (without more information). Just sayin'

api2• 11 years ago

This is normal for Google's byzantine hiring process. I got in once a while back (way before what I'm doing now) with a high recommendation from an insider, successfully cleared the interviews, and never heard anything. They even flew me to Mountain View.

The second time they called, I declined.

ipozgaj• 11 years ago

Google is well known in the Valley for having really bad interviewing process, but from this article it's not really obvious that's the case here, nor that she's being discriminated for her age. Her resume does look nice, but that tells us nothing about her skills or performance on the interviews.

e40• 11 years ago

Regarding the age portion of this. I've visited Google a bunch of times. I'm always amazed how young people are there. It seems more like a college campus than a business. It seems to me, in the Mountain View complex, at busy times like lunch, that 95% of the people I'd see are in the 20-30 range, with a few older people sprinkled in. It's been this way every time I've been there.

ConceptJunkie• 11 years ago

I worked for AOL in 2005-2006 back before the huge layoffs occurred (and me included) and it had a similar "college campus" vibe. Overall, it wasn't a bad place to work, but upper management was a living testament to Dilbert. The company I work for now has a wide range of ages, including a lot of older people... which is good, because I'm 50 now.

AOL's hiring process at the time was similarly dysfunctional. I'd interviewed once a year or two previously, but never heard back (which I didn't realize at the time is now the norm). The only reason I was able to eventually get in was because I had a friend working there who got me past the HR barriers. This friend, who was much more experienced than I was only able to be hired when a technical manager stumbled across his resume. Apparently, he couldn't get past HR either, but when the manager found about my friend his attitude was "Why in the world aren't we interviewing this guy?!" As I said, I got laid off, but my friend is still there.

My experience with some companies has been that hiring is run by HR people who have no idea what they are doing, or whom they are looking for, or how to filter resumes by anything other than keywords (e.g., the proverbial "10 years experience with a two-year-old technology" nonsense) and so the hiring managers often never get a chance to see candidates they would be very interested in.

vinceyuan• 11 years ago

"Google favors workers who are under the age 40" I am thinking about my career path. I don't know if a company will hire me as a software developer when I am 40+ years old. I do understand the companies like young people.

plonh10• 11 years ago

I have been surprised at how many programmers left the industry to become farmers.

Woman recruited by Google four times and rejected, joins age-discrimination suit

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