How I got into Google | Interview process & reflections

I've actually received quite a few questions and comments about people asking me how I even landed this role this entire process from application all the way down to final offer probably took somewhere from one of the biggest differences from Consulting having now moved to an actual company is at the end of the day the only thing that really matters is whether or not you're willing to show up and put your best foot forward to move towards whatever goal it is that you're chasing [Music] [Music] [Music] good morning we're heading to work today and it's a

Friday for those of you who are new here my name is Matt I'm currently working in corporate strategy at a big tech company but prior to that I was actually working in Consulting and so if you look at my channel that's why a lot of my videos are Consulting focused prior to that I actually worked in investment banking so I have a few videos on finance as well today's a Friday and my company is only 3 days return to office mandatory and so most people only come in Tuesday through Thursday but I personally just come

in Monday to Thursday or Monday to Friday just because I've really grown to appreciate the stability that comes with having a nice routine I also just enjoy working in the office and seeing my co-workers and also just feel like I'm a lot more productive Ive when I am in the office and so I don't want to sound like a boomer because I definitely think it's possible to be productive at home but just me personally staying in my shoe box New York City Apartment I'm never as productive as I am when I am in the office

[Music] [Music] good morning [Music] okay all right so just got to the office and we have a bit of an issue which is that I just realized I did not bring my tripod and so normally I would have it set up around the office as I work to get these shots but today you guys are just going to have to watch me make do with what I have which in this case is literally just my camera and office furniture so apologies in advance if the rest of this video is a little bit rough because I'm

trying my best here 3 hours later oh this looks great thank you how are you nice all right guys so I just finished up a call with one of the senior product managers on a team that we're working with and over the past couple weeks I've been having a ton of one-on-one calls with various people just to meet everyone on the team and I definitely think that one of the biggest differences from Consulting having now moved to an actual company is just the level of complexity at such a large company like Google and so like

in Consulting you can typically get up to speed in a new case in a matter of weeks because you're staying at a relatively high level but here when you're actually working at the company you have to be intimately familiar with everything at the company or maybe not everything at the company but everything about the teams that you work with the most closely and even getting to that level of detail takes much longer than you think and was a little bit of a surprise to me and I think the reason why it takes so long is

because you not only have to meet and build relationships with a lot of different people around the company in order to be effective but you also have to get up to speed on just a ton of context from what has currently been going on at the company before you joined and not only that but every company has its own specific way of doing things its own set of jargon and acronyms and its own complicated org structure and the org structure at Google is definitely not very straightforward it is a matrix to org structure which means

that the company is organized not only by function like sales marketing Finance but also by product so you know like the pixel and other devices and ads and YouTube Etc and so all that's to say it's actually taken quite a while for me to get up to speed and I think it's going to continue to take a few more months at the least for me to fully understand what is going on here and so that has been one of the biggest surprises and differences that I found from Consulting now although I'm getting up to speed

on the job still I can definitely speak intelligently about the interview process and how I actually got this job and I've actually received quite a few questions and comments about people asking me how I even landed this role out of Consulting and so hopefully this is helpful for you now a lot of you in the first stage asked me whether or not I was contacted via a head hunter recruiter or whether I applied online and so to walk you through the entire process from application all the way down to the final offer this is what

my process looked like so I applied to Google through an online application I was not contacted through any kind of head hunter or recruiter I did have a referral and I do believe you should always apply to these kinds of competitive roles with a referral if you possibly can because there's such a sheer volume of candidates that you need to do everything to stack the odds in your favor and something that I feel obligated to share is that that I actually applied to Google five times and was rejected in the first four times before I

even landed an interview and so it was by no means like the first time that I applied that I got this job the first four times I literally applied and then was Auto rejected or rejected after a day or two and had honestly no clue why I was rejected even though I felt that I had a really strong application and honestly you know just looking at the job posting on LinkedIn I would see the words oh over a 100 applicants have applied and I would be like thinking to myself okay well what the heck there's

no way that I'm even going to get to the first round um but after the fifth time of trying I landed an interview and I was invited to the next stage which is the hiring assessment and so this was really just a online assessment where I was asked a bunch of questions maybe like 20 to 30 questions and after about a day day or two I heard back that I had passed this and was invited to actually schedule a call with a recruiter and so I spoke to HR for the first time I spoke to

a person for the first time here and they gave me a little bit of context on the role and what the expectations were if I were to proceed and then they gave me a case study after that and this was a takehome case study now this is where depending on what role that Google you apply to there's there's probably going to be some Divergence right here because for the strategy and operations role that I was applying to they gave a case study but maybe if you applying to an engineering role for example they're going to

do something else and so I got a take home case study I had about 7 days to complete it and it was very vague very ambiguous they basically asked a very vague business question which I had to then come up with my own structured response to including a eight-page slide deck and I submitted my deliverable after one week to HR and then they passed it on to the team to review and that took about another week and so after that it took a few days but I uh eventually scheduled the first of three to four

rounds of 45-minute interviews the first round was just a debrief of the case study but also to meet the hiring manager and then the rounds after that were just to meet other members of the team and each of these interviews consisted of a pretty traditional Consulting style case interview as well as some behavioral as well because what I've found is Google is not only hiring for ability to do the job but also whether or not you're just a good person in general and friendly and collaborative and so there were a lot of behavior rals asked

about how I work with other people now after I had done three to four rounds of these interviews I finally heard back probably 3 or four weeks later from the recruiter saying that they were going to extend me an offer I was super excited Super ecstatic honestly was ready to literally sign on the spot but but people told me that I should definitely negotiate the offer because what a lot of these tech companies can do is they can increase your total comp if you just ask it's a little bit more difficult to increase the base

salary in the actual cash comp but you can definitely negotiate on the equity portion and so that's what I did and I actually managed to get a significant increase in equity as part of my package and then I accepted the final offer from there now this entire process from application all the way down to final offer probably took somewhere from one to two months and so as you can see these interview process move pretty slowly and it's not uncommon for people to take like a week or two in between rounds before they hear anything back

but hopefully this at least gives you a bit of a better understanding of what an SN interview process might look like if you are pursuing that kind of a role [Music] so I know some of you might be watching this video from home or from school right now and you might have some kind of goal or some kind of dream that you've been thinking about for some time but you don't feel like you have what it takes to achieve it maybe it's the fact that you see all these other people at your school who are

so much more talented more well spoken charismatic or attractive than you or maybe if you're working full-time you're seeing these other co-workers of yours that come across as so much more intelligent and better at building relationships at work than you and what I have to say to that is I understand you and I feel you and I have been there and there have been many instances in my career and when I was a student where I felt like I was not the best candidate for the job and that there was always going to be someone

who was better than me at that role and they would land that job instead of me now I recently spoke with someone working full-time on the phone his first year out of college who was unhappy with his current role and and wanting to switch over to Consulting and he told me you know Matt like to be honest with you I don't think that I have very good chances of Landing this consulting job because there are so many other people that are more qualified than me that are interviewing for these mbb positions and that got me

thinking because at the end of the day there are 8 billion people on this Earth and there is always bound to be someone who is quote unquote better than you or more Well Suited than you at whatever it is that you are trying to achieve or accomplish but I think what's important here is that the universe rewards people who are willing to still try despite knowing that they are not the best person for that job and so if there's anything that you take away from this video I want it to be that at the end

of the day the only thing that really matters is whether or not you're willing to show up and put your best foot forward to move towards whatever goal it is that you're chasing I hope that you found this video valuable or at least entertaining and with that I will see you guys in the next one thanks for watching bye for now [Music] oh a s