Applied online in July, took a few weeks to get a response from Google. The processes started with Google asking me to fill out some questions in relation to a project that i'd worked on. After submitting this i was quickly pushed on to the next stage. About a couple of weeks later, I had a virtual meeting with the hiring manager who asked me some product related questions as well as a few sql questions. E.g. how would you know when to send a push-up notification to a consumer, what metrics would you look at / measure / optimize upon. I also passed a sql test at this point. The product-related questions were pretty open ended.
It took about 2 weeks to find out that I'd be accepted to the next and final stage of the process (it was strange that they would take so long in making that decision. At this point, i had accepted a job elsewhere, however after relentlessly applying over a number of years i wanted to push through this to the end.)
The next and final stage of the process was in the London HQ , 4-in a row + (?business lunch?) interview process. I thought my first interview went really well as i felt i answered questions okay, and they were open ended. I got a "hope to see you soon" kind of ending - but the questions were so relentless that there was barely enough time for me to ask a lot of questions at the end and understand the role i was applying for in better detail. The second interview was similar, ending with a quick sheet of paper where i was told to demonstrate / define linear regression and then quickly told to write some sql code based on some columns , the question had make me nervous as I didn't fully understand what the output / business case of the problem was trying to solve and it was a twister using counts/subqueries where i didn't stay calm. Before i could finish, the interviewer had to end the session for lunch and took my paper.
After this there were 2 video calls remaining - these interviewers were pretty friendly and asked me to go through more product based questions (e.g. how would you decide what to show someone on netflix, what programming skills do you know, types of joins, etls etc.) The last one ended with a sql test which i thought went better than the second one but i think there was something that they didnt like in the way i was writing or i didnt make myself 'sound confident' . I think this was partly the basis of my application getting rejected or not being strong enough, they did not give proper feedback following the process and it really left a bitter taste for me. I've applied so many times and not to get strong feedback / weighing up negatives/positives after reaching the final stage really left me pissed off to be frank.
If they are looking for programmers / statisticians rather than industry business analysts then it should be more clear. I can also write queries with all joins, various functions, subqueries as well as picking up new functions off the table but if I'm given 30 sec to look at dataset and crunch and then get harsh criticism for my code (where i'm not a full programmer) then so be it. I'm honestly not sure if i feel like even trying to apply again. I also felt a bit of a arrogance from a couple of the people in the recruitment process as well as some robotic-ness from HR (you don't have to explicitly tell me the timezone of our call when you know i'm based in the UK already and we just spoke 20min prior to arranging the call. Also got a couple of memes from their HR... felt odd more than anything.)