I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Sep 2015
Interview
First you work with a recruiter who decides whether to put you through to the next round. Next you have a phone interview, where a current Product Manager begins by asking several questions. Why Product Manager, why Google, etc. Then you are given several case questions. These questoins can be oddly specific and stump even the best efforts to prepare. No feedback is given.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Google (Kirkland, WA) in Jul 2015
Interview
The last interviewer was via video conference. In the beginning, I could hear his voice small and remotely, although we tried everything. Several times I had to ask him to repeat, and that limited my interaction with him. Also, although he could hear me, I was unconsciously trying hard all the way to speak loud due to empathy.
In the middle of an interview question, his voice was completely gone. 5 minutes later the IT lady came in again, tried everything, it still didn't work. She then went to prepare another room. 5 minutes later, I had to move to another room, rewrite what I just wrote on the whiteboard (because I needed to prioritize the list of features the next step).
This last interview was quite disturbing and definitely impacted my performance.
I requested the hiring committee to take this into account (say, discount the last interview result, or quickly reschedule 1 interview since I live locally), and got a No.
I applied online. The process took 5 months. I interviewed at Google (Londres, Inglaterra) in Jan 2016
Interview
An excruciatingly long process from start to finish. From multiple telephone interviews to a full-day of interviews at Google's London offices. The full-day of interviews could have been easily conducted within an hour as the questions presented were all roughly along the same theme.
My first interview was conducted by a guy who really didn't want to be there. That unfortunately set the tone for the rest of the day. The arrogance of the "director" interview (third interview) put me off Google altogether, so I was looking to leave fairly quickly after that. Playing on your phone and laptop in a 1:1 interview is rude, no matter who you are. As a contractor, that day of interviews cost me over £600 - the least you could do was read my CV and listen to what I had to say. In total, I would estimate the process took around 14 hours of my time over 5 months.
Overall I dodged a bullet by not working there, but blown away by the organisation.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Critical thinking - looking at your approach to solving estimation questions - e.g. estimate number of trees in a forest.