[thaumasiotes]

> The interviews can be progressive, meaning you don't make it through the first 2 hours - good bye.

Is that knowledge available in real time? When I interviewed at Google last year, the next thing I heard back from the recruiter was that I'd passed the interviews and should expect a job offer. She wished me congratulations. A couple weeks later, she informed me that my interview scores were too low to get a job offer. It remains unclear to me why there would be separate thresholds for "passing" and "eligible for hire".

[vineyardmike]

So a lot of companies have “hiring committee” (incl google) that are required to approve a person write the job offer. The interviewers rate the candidates, and offer notes/transcripts, but don’t have the final say. The HC meets periodically, so there’s a delay between interview and offer letter.

What probably happened was that the recruiter looked at your profile, read the comments, and expected you to pass the HC (and told you the next day)… but you didn’t in the end.

Now last year Google implemented a hiring freeze, so you could have fell into that. I would believe that for easier-to-fill roles, during the hiring freeze they suddenly had a glut of candidates who “passed” with no job to give them, so the suddenly “failed” and we’re sent away.

[thaumasiotes]

> Now last year Google implemented a hiring freeze, so you could have fell into that.

I think this was earlier than the freeze. It was certainly earlier than any awareness of a freezing job market made it onto HN; the email from the recruiter promising to give me good news on a phone call tomorrow -- a rare example of a Google recruiter putting something in writing -- arrived on January 12 of last year. There was a very long lag between that call, described in my earlier comment and presumably taking place on Jan 13, and the followup telling me I'd been rejected on March 2. I undersold that by describing it as "a couple weeks".

On the other hand, according to my memory I was informed that I should see a job offer by the end of February - I noted at the time (to myself) that the schedule was surprisingly long - and in the light of your comment, that and the timing of my eventual rejection do tend to support the idea that the hiring committee's next scheduled meeting was at the end of February.