Re: [tlug] FWIW: Google Japan Interview Experience

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Shin MICHIMUKO writes:

Interesting analysis.  First I want to remark that I haven't been
there, my information is academic HR research (I'm an English editor
of a general business journal so I do see a fair amount of it) and
reports from my students.  But maybe the following comments will be of
interest.

 > I think that Google is still getting many candidates, and they can let 
 > the candidates wait and shopping among the candidates.

>From the OP's description, I think that one factor that is probably
happening with Google is that there's internal competition among
managers for good candidates.  (FWIW, Guido van Rossum has mentioned
this on mailing lists in the context of "why you won't hear from me
for a while, sorry".)  So *all* the managers with openings want to
interview *all* the top candidates.  Then there's a shirking problem,
the hiring decision will be made on the basis of "averages" and the
candidate allocated to the manager by a higher-up.  So no individual
manager has much incentive to do a good interview; everything they
need to know for their decision is contained in the resume and the
handshake. :-(

In general, I know from personal experience that reviewing resumes and
reading prepared reports is *extremely* expensive.  While reading an
academic paper is presumably very different from reading the kind of
product evaluations the OP described, I spent as much as a half day on
some of the papers I had to read as a recruiter, for a total of over
250 hours for 150 papers.  I find it hard to imagine that reading a
product evaluation report would take less than 15 minutes, probably
more like 30, and in some cases 60.  So let's say the ratio of
candidate time-to-produce to employer time-to-evaluate is 50:1.  I
don't think the OP should feel bad; the typical academic paper I read
was probably about a man-year's work (including advisor and classmate
reviews), so that's 500:1. :-)  And the first interview for a Ph.D.
looking for a job at a university typically lasts 20 minutes.

To the OP: I dunno guy, while I admit you're being treated badly
compared to employers you would consider similar, I have to wonder how
far out of line it is for a company like Google which is perhaps more
like a pure research facility than a traditional bricks and mortar
maker that also does research (AT&T, IBM, HP).

Regarding "sour grapes", I don't see any reason to believe the reports
people cite in this thread are particularly inaccurate.  They're
probably slightly exaggerated: people always think painful experiences
last longer than pleasant ones, for example.  But calendar time and
things like that are probably measured accurately.  One should be
careful about attributions of interviewer motivation, both the levels
and the source, of course, but the interviewee was there, and people
are generally pretty intuitive about those things.

 > And believe me, the normal Japanese companies have less interviews
 > than gaishi-kei companies, even if the companies are so huge.

I'm not sure this is the right comparison to make.

It depends on how you count non-interview company visits.  My students
(mostly bank/shoken candidates) report 5-10 company visits before
getting naitei.  (I'm not sure how to count interviews after
nainaitei, but I'm including them.)  Of those, typically 1-2 are sort of
group interviews where candidates introduce themselves and talk about
their aspirations and motivation for choosing the company, and 2-3 are
interviews with the manager responsible for their employment
activities (not necessarily the direct supervisor, who sometimes isn't
in the process!) and someone at the bucho or even VP/torishimariyaku
level.  The rest are mostly activities providing information to
candidates about the company, filling forms, taking entrance exams,
and the like.  I am amazed at the amount of time students spend at
company beck and call before they get naitei; for practical purposes,
an MBA student at the University of Tsukuba spends four terms studying
and two terms in employment search.  For undergrads, usually the whole
senior year is wasted (they spend somewhat less time on direct
employment activity, but it's enough to seriously impact their
studies, and unpaid orientation activities and sometimes actual work
(also unpaid!)  start as early as January).

I don't know much about engineering students, the few I've talked to
are mostly students who want to go abroad for graduate study and are
generally unhappy with the whole scene for employing new graduates.
They tell a similar story, though.

The causes for the differences seem apparent.  "Normal" large Japanese
companies don't much care who they hire, as long as the resume is good
and the candidate doesn't have bad breath or other obvious social
disabilities.  And once they've got you, they don't much care who you
are (cf. the cases of "Blue Diode" Nakamura and "Nobel Prize" Tanaka).
While this is distasteful to most Americans I know (including me),
there are "good" reasons for this.  For the first, they trust their HR
process to produce good employees in a year or two.  For the second,
Japanese companies (as institutions) try to treat everybody well, and
many succeed (although even in good companies a bad boss can make life
hell for subordinates, and the employees have much less mobility than
U.S. counterparts in the same situation, good companies are generally
able to rein in such bad apples).

OTOH, gaishikei companies don't trust their better employees to still
be at the firm in a year or two.  And competition, meaning differential
rewards, is at the root of the "American-style" firm (which is what
most people mean by "gaishikei" here; even the European firms that "go
global" tend to play by U.S. rules overseas).