Skip Google phone screen via employee referral?
I heard that if a Google employee gives you a strong referral, then you might directly get a onsite interview. Is this true? How likely is this? Or is the chance solely based on the applicant?
I skipped mine. I had referrals and multiple onsites scheduled with other big companies, I think that helped more.
I skipped FB phone screen without any referrals.
This exactly happened to me. Straight to on-site following referral, where I entered a bloodbath that I was very poorly prepared for. Learned a lot about how much the floor had raised on interview expectations, I guess, for what it’s worth.
Story time?!? I’d love to hear more about it.
Ehhh...no real story here, just that I wasn’t prepared for 5 straight hours of white-boarding. And the types of questions were far past what I’d seen from places even 2 or 3 years prior. It’s gone from finding the second smallest in arrays and reversing strings in place to simulating games of chess and plotting lines on a graph. My own fault for not practicing enough. I was interviewing for a test position, so I expected more conversation around testing with some coding mixed in. Stay on top of your leetcode, folks. Don’t just solve them, learn how to solve them under time pressure with interviewers that seem annoyed to even be there.
I had a referral and a competing offer so was basically fast tracked in the whole process including skipping the phone interview.
^ this. I had an offer from MS and my entire process (recruiter call, onsite, offer) took less than 3 weeks
https://www.practicecodinginterview.com/blog/2018/8/4/the-google-interview-process
With a strong referral, yes. But it needs to be an actual referral where the referee and the referee actually worked together, etc.