Jeff Barr posts about his experience with Google’s recruiters:

Last year Google tried to convince me to join their ranks. I had a nice trip to Mountain View, a pleasant day of interviews, and a glimpse inside of their campus. All pretty cool. I ended up shutting down the process between the “we really want to hire you” and the “here’s the offer” phases, for any number of reasons that I won’t get in to tonight. Ok, just one of them.

I have heard a couple of interesting accounts of Google’s internal systems that paint a less than flattering picture of the company. First and foremost, they spent a lot of time with Workday only to pass on them because they wanted their operational systems to be on-premise… imagine the irony of Google not selecting a vendor because their solution is hosted.

Next up was Successfactors and Google passed on them for the same reason and then built their own talent management system that is leaving the Googlers who have to use it less than pleased. It would appear that their recruiting system, based on Jeff Barr’s account and those of the commenters on his post, similarly disappoints.

It’s not uncommon for high growth companies to play catch up in the back office, even if they are a 10 year old company, so I don’t have much reason to discount these anecdotes, but anecdotes they are and I can’t corroborate them.

Tags: Google, Workday, Jeff Barr, Successfactors