By my rough calculations they're hiring 1 person for every 650 applications. That's quite the winnowing process.
If they have two pre-qualifying rounds of CV burning where at each stage they trash 80% of the CVs, then they'd be down to about 26 before even talking to anyone. Now four rounds of interviews where 50% of the people are eliminated and you still have 1.625 people left...
We used to have ridiculous numbers like that at MSFT. If Google is reporting them the same way, they're not counting re-applications and people who are completely unqualified and either hoping for a lottery win or are just satisfying some unemployment requirement.
Seriously, the recruiting folks told me that the vast majority of the "blind submit" resumes that came in via e-mail and website forms were unchanged duplicates of things already in the database.
If they have two pre-qualifying rounds of CV burning where at each stage they trash 80% of the CVs, then they'd be down to about 26 before even talking to anyone. Now four rounds of interviews where 50% of the people are eliminated and you still have 1.625 people left...