Google has been the darling of the employee/recruitment world for a while due to their upwardly mobile stock price, reputation, place where smart people are, and lavish employee perks. We always heard about people leaving for Google, and never much about anyone leaving.
Has the tide started to shift? Last week SFGate.com penned a piece called “O’ Googlers, where art thou?” that chronicles what some early Google employees are doing today, and discusses a little bit about why they left. There are numerous quotes from the former employees talking about things like the company culture changing, there being too many employees, and feeling like their contributions aren’t important anymore.
Then today it was announced that key Google European executive Joanna Shields left Google for social networking company Bebo. Google has thousands of employees, and lots of executives, so let’s not overblow this, but at the same time you can start to see that some people don’t see staying at Google as the right choice for them for whatever reason.
Has Google reached the point where key people start looking for more exciting opportunties?
Yes. Google has over 10,000 employees. That alone is enough to make people look for different challenges.
Here in New York, Google supposedly hired about a thousand people in a year to fill their new space in Manhattan’s largest office building (in terms of total square footage). Thing that’s amazing about it is that hiring managers say they look at 100 to 150 resumes for every one person selected to be interviewed. Then the applicant has to jump the famous hurdles: numerous interviews with eight or more people over two or more months. With all that resume screening, intense interviewing (one director-level person told me he spends more than half of every week doing this) etc., it’s a miracle any work gets done.
But you can’t argue with success; nor can you blame some people for taking their $450 per share payouts and moving on after a while!
It is tough to argue with the success, and I can’t blame those that cashed out in any way.