I went to the Google reception in Sydney and told the nice lady at the front desk that I had a lunch meeting with Elvis. She asked me to take a seat, Elvis would be with me shortly.

Whilst I was waiting for Elvis I looked around the reception area. Interesting. A single tyre was hanging from the ceiling and the nearest meeting room had its chairs suspended from the ceiling accessible by a series of pulleys. But what really caught my eye was the large plasma screen mounted on one of the reception walls showing in “real time” what people were searching for on Google. Obviously the rolling list was sanitised in some way because the it showed search items like shoe laces, university entrance scores, green building materials and gluten free foods. Not one naughty word in sight.

When Elvis came, we greeted each other, and strolled out of the building together. I told him that I had found a great place nearby that served wonderful – yes you guessed it – hamburgers!

In the restaurant I asked Elvis about his background before he joined Google and the how and why of him being hired. He detailed at length his reasons for joining Google, but what I found most interesting was the way that he was hired.

Elvis was working at another technology organisation operating in a different market to that of Google. A close friend of Elvis suggested that he would be a great addition to the team at Google and that if he (Elvis) wanted to he could arrange it an initial interview. Elvis agreed – it would be fun to interview with Google.

Little did Elvis know that the interview process would take 8 separate meetings spanning over 9 months. I have been working in the talent search space for over 12 years and I have never heard of a hiring process involving that many meetings over that amount of time – not even for CEOs of major publicly listed compnaies.  Why so many meetings? Tune into the next post to find out.

Bye for now,

James E

James Evangelidis

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Tagged as: Elvis, Google, hamburger