How Long Before Google Lets You Know You Have a Job Offer
What I Learned on My Manner to a Google Offer
A story of my chore search equally told through facts, figures, and lessons learned
I spent the last 8 months of my life interviewing and looking for my next job. Along the manner, I kept detailed records. I have combed through the data and institute some interesting information. If y'all are about to embark on your ain employment quest, you should accept a expect at the data to know what yous are getting into. I even accept some tips that I hope will be of some help.
When I started my job hunt, I was halfway done with my Principal of Software Technology program at Carnegie Mellon University. It was May 2020, so COVID-19 was at its superlative. Some companies had entered a hiring freeze and it was looking like it would exist difficult to observe a job. I was graduating in December, then I did non have the luxury to wait for a better job market place.
My Groundwork
To set the context for the rest of the article, I will briefly explicate my background. If you are curious, yous can look me up on LinkedIn. I maintain a detailed profile.
At the fourth dimension of my job search, I was a master's student at Carnegie Mellon Academy. Prior to graduate school, I worked for over six years at Liberty Mutual Insurance in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. I primarily worked on a DevOps team responsible for the API management platform. I specialized in RESTful APIs. I was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, just I predominantly worked with Node.js microservices. By the fourth dimension I left the company, I was a senior software engineer.
Likewise my piece of work at Liberty Mutual, I had experience co-founding a startup. The startup was born out of a successful hackathon. It failed to get traction in the market place, so we closed up shop later three years.
Prior to Liberty Common, I graduated from Bentley University with a Computer Information Systems degree.
My Timeline
My job search started in May and lasted until the end of Dec. Eight months is longer than average, but I could beget the time since I was non going to graduate until December. I imagine it would have been very difficult to complete the unabridged process in any less than four months. If y'all are starting the process, yous should look information technology to have four-vi months.
I started the process by figuring out how I was going to prepare. I spent most of my preparation time organizing an interview written report group to help my classmates. The members of the group solved bug, discussed solutions, and interviewed each other. Nosotros improved our trouble-solving and got comfortable with the interview format.
I also used Algo Monster and LeetCode to practice technical interview problems. Past mid-August, I was comfortable doing iii mock interviews dorsum to back to back. And then information technology was time to showtime applying.
I started applying past searching through LinkedIn task postings and companies' career pages. This was a tedious process. I fabricated it more manageable by spending a little time each mean solar day applying.
The start weeks of applying were disheartening due to the number of instant rejections. I did not know why my resume was being passed over. Somewhen, recruiters started getting back to me. It was easier to handle the 1-3 rejections per day in one case I had several interviews booked.
From Oct to early December, I was in the total swing of things. I applied and interviewed. I received rejections and offers. My first offers came in early Nov. They connected to trickle in throughout the middle of December. All in all, I ended up with six offers out of 185 applications.
After I finished interviewing, it took me ii more weeks to negotiate my compensation. Then the procedure was over. Information technology was champagne and smiles as I signed an offer from Google.
How Did I Spend My Fourth dimension?
In full, I spent 350 hours on my job search. During the process, I used Toggle to rails how I spent my fourth dimension:
Here is what each activity entailed:
- Preparing — I spent this time gathering resources and figuring out how to practice interviewing. The nigh time-consuming activity was organizing an interview study group with my classmates.
- Practicing —I spent extra time practicing for coding interviews considering I had never taken a data structures or algorithms class. I practiced by solving issues and doing mock interviews.
- Applying — I read job postings on LinkedIn and career pages. I also contacted friends in the industry to run across if their companies were hiring. I practical for a wide multifariousness of roles at various companies. Information technology felt like I spent more 43 hours applying to openings, so it is likely that I am missing some data.
- Interviewing — This was the fourth dimension spent on telephone screens, online assessments, technical phone interviews, virtual on-site interviews, and offer negotiations. This besides includes the fourth dimension I spent analogous these activities. It surprised me how much fourth dimension I spent scheduling interviews. If you are starting to interview, you lot will spend more fourth dimension sending emails than yous think.
Throughout the interview process, the corporeality of time I spent on each activity varied, as depicted in the chart below:
At the start, I spent nigh of my time preparing and practicing. Following my practicing height, I started applying. It took a little while for companies to start responding. In one case they did, I spent about of my fourth dimension interviewing. I connected applying for another month simply stopped when I started to receive offers. Finally, after 34 weeks and countless interviews, I signed an offer and rested.
What Roles Did I Apply For?
I was looking for a senior software engineering position. I enjoyed my Software Engineering for Artificial Intelligence class, so I was looking to work on AI-enabled systems. If possible, I also wanted to put my distributed systems cognition to use by building scalable systems.
The following charts provide some analysis of the roles that I applied for:
I primarily practical to senior software roles. I as well practical to many car learning positions. The radial chart shows that I received fewer responses for the ML positions. I believe this was because all of my AI/ML feel was academic.
What Type of Companies Did I Apply To?
I applied to many different companies — from early-phase startups to massive enterprises. The following chart provides some summary-level information most those companies:
I noticed that medium-sized companies were the nearly likely to have unique interviewing practices. I am defining medium-sized every bit 150-500 employees or a valuation of $ane-5B. Near companies use the traditional technical interview procedure. This consists of an HR telephone screen, an algorithm telephone interview, and a final round of technical, pattern, and civilisation interviews.
However, the medium-sized companies were more likely to devious from the norm. The nearly mutual derivation I saw was a take-home problem with a gear up of requirements. Ofttimes, the problem was directly related to the business or role. Sometimes, the requirements were intentionally vague. In all honesty, I preferred those types of questions. I felt that my solutions demonstrated actual engineering science skills, unlike with traditional algorithm questions.
How Difficult Were the Interviews?
Over the grade of my job search, I applied to 185 positions. As one might expect, the hardest step of the process was getting an initial response. Only one in five companies expressed interest upon receiving my resume. Information technology's hard to know whether my resume was rejected past a homo, AI, or because the company was in a hiring freeze. Many companies never responded.
From there, I had much more success. I had a >50% laissez passer-through rate for each remaining stage of the interview process. This means that for any given application, I had a 3.3% risk of receiving an offering.
To collect this data, I categorized the stages of the interview process:
- Applied — Submitted my resume.
- Recruiter — Either someone from HR or a hiring manager reached out to schedule a 30-minute telephone screen.
- Phone interview — A one-hour technical telephone interview and/or a take-dwelling online assessment.
- Onsite — A 2-6-60 minutes set of technical, design, and civilization-fit interviews. Since I interviewed during COVID-19, these interviews were done nigh.
- Offer — I passed!
Information technology surprised me that my pass-through rate was constant throughout the later stages. I expected each round of interviews to be harder than the last. This was ordinarily not the example. With a few exceptions, the difficulty of the interview did not increase between the phone interview and the on-site interview. I recall the goal of the on-site was to make sure the telephone interview was not an anomaly.
Lessons Learned
1. Practice, practice, practice
The most important function of my job search was the time I spent practicing for the technical interviews. I eclipsed 100 hours of practice. According to an interviewing.io survey, this corporeality of preparation is common.
To be good at interviewing, you need to be good at solving technical questions. You need a basic agreement of information structures and algorithms and lots of practice problems. I thought Algo Monster was the best resources to larn the algorithms and LeetCode was the best identify to find practice problems.
The other attribute of interviewing is existence comfortable with the interview format. An interview is more performance than programming. In an interview, you must talk through your code equally y'all write it, which does not come up naturally to most engineers. The best matter I did to ready was to create a study group. I highly recommend reaching out to engineer friends and creating your own group.
Like many performances, you should do a low-stakes exercise run before the big bear witness. People don't go from singing in the shower to performing at the Apollo. They often start with a couple of open up mic nights. If you practice interviewing with your peers, and then the operation aspect of interviewing will go second nature. If yous cannot find people to practice with, there are online resource that provide mock interviews, such as interviewing.io.
ii. Don't get discouraged
I know you already know this. I knew this during my job search, merely I still concluded up discouraged in the middle of September. Recollect that companies are much more concerned well-nigh false positives (bad candidates who receive offers) than false negatives (good candidates who get rejected). You will become rejected for jobs that you lot are perfect for. Their loss. Keep on applying and interviewing.
3. Apply to many opportunities
Since you are going to be rejected for positions that you deserve, you lot demand to bandage a wide net. This isn't a bad thing. Chore descriptions aren't perfect. You may find out that a role is more interesting than you originally thought. You lot may as well detect out that your preferred job is less heady than its description.
The other reason to apply to many opportunities is for practice. Early on, you want some interviews that y'all do not mind bombing. This will help you to prepare for the companies that excite yous. I also ran into a situation where I needed a practice company at the end of my interview procedure. I had a two-week period without whatsoever technical interviews. I had become a petty rusty, so I used one visitor to warm up for a different interview.
four. Plan when to utilise to big companies
1 advantage of large companies is that they have a well-divers recruiting process. They have so many applicants going through the arrangement that it is piece of cake to know how long the process volition take. The downside is that the number of candidates interviewing makes the procedure less flexible.
For case, if you take an expiring offer and demand to expedite the process, this will be much harder at a big company. Modest companies are more flexible nigh expediting the process or extending deadlines.
I ran into a situation where I applied to a FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) visitor late in the procedure and had to ask to expedite the interviews. They did as much as they could, but it however took a calendar month. Yous should expect the interview procedure for FAANG companies to have iv-6 weeks. A good time to apply would be 2-3 weeks before you expect to get your first offering.
5. Use your contacts
Wait through LinkedIn to run into if you know anyone at the visitor. I volition admit that I am not corking at doing this. It can exist uncomfortable to ask for a favor, merely it pays off.
During my job search, I reached out to anybody from shut friends to friends of friends. No one refused to aid me. The biggest benefit of the referral is that you lot get noticed more than oft. 57% (4/seven) of my referrals resulted in a call from a recruiter. This is a big comeback from the 18% callback without a referral. I fifty-fifty had a friend of a friend follow up with Hour multiple times to cheque on the status of my awarding. I'm certain 60 minutes would have forgotten about my application, but I ended up with an interview.
I imagine referrals had less of an bear upon on the afterwards stages of the procedure. But if they merely improved the odds at the offset stage, my chances of getting an offer from any given application still jumped from 3% to ten%. In actuality, I saw an offer rate of 28% (2/7) from referrals.
If you experience uncomfortable request for a referral, remember that virtually companies have a generous referral policy. Therefore, y'all are helping an acquaintance get a dainty bonus and they are helping you lot become a job. You both win.
Conclusion
Since each job search is unique, I expect my experience will differ from yours. No matter who y'all are, the procedure will be challenging. I struggled at points along the way, but I concluded up with a new job.
I hope the information and tips I have provided assistance you lot along your journey. Happy hunting!
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Source: https://betterprogramming.pub/what-i-learned-on-my-way-to-a-google-offer-d98a0b8db3e1
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