They reached out to me through my school email. I had one phone screen and then was brought on site in mountain view to have four in person interviews. Two in the morning, an off the record lunch with an engineer where I was encouraged to ask questions about life at Google, and then two more interviews after lunch.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Google in May 2015
Interview
I was referred by someone already working there full-time, and the first part of the process was a 45 minute phone screening. The interviewer had a pretty heavy accent and the phone connection was terrible, lots of static, so it was difficult to understand a lot of what he said, in hindsight I wish I had asked about using Google Hangouts. We were using Google docs so I was able to read his questions at least. There were no behavior questions, just 2 technical questions. After the 2nd question we were at 40 minutes and he said he had 1 question left but we didn't have enough time.
I had the chance to ask my own questions for the last few minutes.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write a function that removes whitespace ('\t', '\n', ' ') from a string
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google
Interview
The recruiter contacted me via email. We set the time and data for a technical phone interview up in the email. The recruiter also sent a list of websites and great resources to let you know what to review and to expect. (be aware, dont just skim over them, make sure you know every concept fairly well). During the interview, he asked me things on my resume, and moved to the technical part. The technical problem took about 40 minutes, and at the end there is the Q&A where the interviewer answers any question you might have about the company in general.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
We went over my resume for a few minutes in the beginning, and we started the real technical interview. Nothing really unexpected. The only question we were able to go through was a question about BFS/DFS, basically traverse through a given 2D array map and find a path.