[sanderjd]

Yeah all the comments on here about being tricked into job interviews just seem so crazy to me. Is google really so desperate to interview people? I've always heard they get tons of applications and that it's incredibly difficult (and time consuming) to get an offer after an interview with them, so why would they be going through all of this trouble to get people in the funnel? I'm really not sure what to make of it all.

[simi_]

I'm CTO at a small startup in a small-ish city in Germany. Every time we advertise a position we get _tons_ of applicants, and yet that doesn't mean anything. Good and reliable engineers are _very_ hard to find and recruit. We've managed to crop together a rock solid team, but only by sheer dumb luck (and getting burned several times).

[czbond]

As a separate, off topic note, I'm looking to move to Germany from the states (CTO of two prior 'smaller' startups). Where would you look for positions? I'm a damn good engineer - but I can't NOT lead - and all I'm seeing thus far are junior/senior dev positions.

[simi_]

AngelList. That's how I got my job.

If you can afford the travel, come and mingle at some startup events. Berlin is obviously the best city to do that, although Cologne (where I'm located) and, I imagine, Munich/Dusseldorf/Hamburg are pretty good too.

[czbond]

Thanks for the advice - I didn't know AngelList had traction out there! That will make it a lot easier....

[iliis]

If Switzerland is also an option, we're a small company developing RF-ICs and -modules currently looking for a CEO/CTO. If you are interested in high-frequency electronics, firmware development and a bit of management drop me an email at s.bryner/axsem.com!

[lordnacho]

Hi, I live in Switzerland, have 10 years experience as a CTO, and I'm looking for something new. Where in CH are you? Mind if I email you?

[iliis]

Sure, send me a message :) We're in Dübendorf, near Zürich.

[afterburner]

Given the legendary meat-grind that is the Google interview process, perhaps people need to be tricked to overcome the initial aversion. Since Google can throw money at recruitment, they basically don't care about wasting their own time, which means they might waste quite a lot of yours.

[gress]

If true, this is totally psychopathic behavior.

[afterburner]

Not really, the recruiters are just incentivized to bring in candidates.

[gress]

Incentives do not excuse psychopathic behavior.

[late2part]

And, let's stipulate that Google's a good company - there are going to be a bad apple here and there. I had to ask my friend who was a senior-director at GOOG to mark me as "do not contact" in their recruiting database to get them to stop calling/emailing me.

[derefr]

Maybe the top of the funnel is the easiest part to optimize in a data-driven fashion, so it's what Google has ended up optimizing. And it's probably to their deficit; it seems to me that the only thing widening your funnel at the top ever gets you is more unqualified leads.

When I hire, I don't think about trying to find more people to interview. Instead, I think about designing the interviewing process such that it's short, simple, and fun for the person being interviewed—because the people who I most want, have the least time and patience for me and the most alternatives, so I have to make choosing to "try my job on" as easy as possible.

When I do this, word spreads (both among those who get hired, and those who don't) that "you may as well go and see if you like them, it's not too much of a hassle" and the result is far more inbound (qualified!) leads, and far less friction in outbound lead-gen.