I applied for an SDE role at Google Munich after a recruiter ( recruiter 0 ) from London reached out to me via LinkedIn. After I expressed interest in Munich location, they put me in touch with another recruiter in Munich. ( Let's call them recruiter 1 ).

Recruiter 1 was very kind and walked me through roles available in Munich location briefly and also helped me by providing preparation material. I went through the full set of interviews around September 2021. Interviews went fine besides a few hiccups in one of the coding interviews where the interviewer basically asked me 5-6 follow up questions and I didn't have enough time to implement them all. Although the recruiter assured me they weren't looking for implementations for all follow-ups but rather wanted to see by thought process only. I was still sceptical about my performance. However, to my pleasant surprised recruiter 1 came back to me with positive feedback. They did say the feedback on coding interviews were a bit mixed but were overall leading towards a positive decision. They also told me that they are happy to take me forward to the team matching step. I was told this step could take some time, and I will have various calls with different recruiters until we mutually agree on team-matching.

In the beginning, this went well, I was immediately matched with one of the hiring managers. He explained the projects he's working on. One of the projects was UI heavy and I said I'd prefer back-end work. He said he does have a back-end project in mind, but it's not finalized and he'll come back to me later. Unfortunately, later recruiter 1 informed me that the other project was shelved for the moment, but assured me that other managers would soon reach out to me.

At this point, things started to get weird. Recruiter 1 wrote me that they're changing the team and a new recruiter ( let's call them recruiter 2 ) will handle my case now. Recruiter 2 set up a call with me. The first call went kinda ok. They were respectable enough towards me. However, they started talking about how my resume doesn't reflect my role as SDE very well and asked me to make some changes. I found this a bit weird because my resume explicitly talked about the projects I have successfully delivered and the impact they created. But the recruiter, for some reason, wanted me to emphasize on tech-stack I used to achieve those results more than the actual impact. I made the changes regardless. But then recruiter 2 basically disappeared and didn't come back to my email for a long time.

I reached out to them after some time, and this time they started appearing downright rude. First, they said that there aren't many roles open in Munich at the moment. But soon they changed the tone and said my resume wasn't technical enough and that's the reason no one was picking up my profile. They also said my interview performance wasn't too great and that's another reason for the delay. But they also said they'll let me know once they hear from any HM. This was very strange to head, cause recruiter 1 had already said they had cleared me for team matching. But more than anything else I was not really happy with how the recruiter conducted themselves in front of me. Anyway, I decided not to think much of this and just wait.

Meanwhile, my partner and I had decided that London would probably be a better option for both of us in long term. So I had also applied to Facebook, London office for an MLE role. This went really well and really fast! Within 2 weeks I had an offer with me!

Now, I was very happy about the Facebook offer. However, I had a soft corner in my heart for Google. So I reached out the recruiter 2 again. This time they were already very defensive saying there aren't many roles open in Google Munich at the moment. So I basically told them that I already have a Facebook MLE offer from London. But I'd prefer to work for Google and asked them to check if I can be aligned against any open positions in London. At this point, the recruiter just gave me a very condescending chuckle and said they didn't think my packet is Google enough for London. But told me they'd check and confirm.

By now, I had strong signals that the recruiter is not playing nice with me so I decided to go ahead with Facebook offer. I was about to inform Google recruiter 2 about it but then I received a mail from them saying they submitted my profile to Hiring Committee and the decision is negative!!! So they wouldn't be able to offer me a job anywhere ( Munich or London ) regardless of the outcome of the team matching process! I did try to inquire more about to which I was told that they have changed the process recently and have decided to submit by the packet ( resume + feedback ) to Hiring Committee before the team matching.

This entire experience has been baffling to me! And I can't believe something like this can happen in a company like Google!

Luckily I am not feeling too bad about this outcome because I had multiple offers from London ( JPM and Amazon also gave positive decisions). However, I did feel bad about the unprofessional attitude of the recruiter and wanted to share the experience with the Leetcode community.

I do believe this is probably an outlier experience. However, I wonder if there's any way I can submit this feedback to Google? Please let me know if you know any!

PS - I am writing this half-asleep so please pardon any spelling/grammatical errors I might have made! (: