I tried to apply for a Director or Senior Director job at Google through employee referals - I knew several employees and they all highly recommended me. Google seems ill equipped to hire Senior Management folks at the Director/VP levels - they may have a separate external recruiting firm for this but I could not figure this out. The internal recruiters whom I worked with did try and find a match and finally found one position called Engineering Manager that I may be a fit for. I was much more senior - but I was curious to check Google out and compare it to the other VP of Engineering offer that I had received from a start up. I had also heard good things about Google as a great place to work, etc. - all the usual stuff you read everywhere. Anyway about the interview, I first got a call from a Director level person and I easily passed his Computer Science style interview which talked about algorithm complexity, etc. I was invited for an in person interview and was looking forward to it. But the experience with 6 face to face interviewers left a lot to be desired. Frankly the way I was treated was "professional" but "cold". There was absolutely no attempt made to learn about me or my skills or what I brought to the table. All the interviews except one were straight standard out of the book tech Q&A. My situation was that I was very technical but had focused my career on management and not written code for several years. Their interview was tailored along newbie manager lines. They asked algorithm and design questions all of which I answered. One of the guys asked me if I wanted to write code for one of my solutions and I politely refused saying that I was not interested in writing code at this stage of my career. Another question I did not get was related to performance - it was a good problem with a creative solution but somehow my brain did not go towards the right solution. I did pick it up after I got hints but I suppose that was not good enough. Anyway to cut the long story short, I did not get the offer since I am sure they thought I was not technical enough but from my side I never would have worked for a company that was so clueless during the interview process. The process treats everyone the same - they don't care about you, they only care if you can get their questions and I suppose that have strong faith in that process. Good luck to them.