I applied online and got a response from a recruiter almost immediately. After that everything went very slowly. The entire process has taken 2 months and the worst thing – communication with my recruiter was almost completely broken: I did not receive responses for several days; the recruiter scheduled phone calls and did not show up, etc. From the very beginning I had the impression that the recruiter is not very interested in dealing with me. I was treated as a low priority candidate. May be it's because of the lack of internal referrals. I think, I could be a very good match for Google: PhD with strong math background, excellent GPA, 15+ years of continuous coding experience, patents, lots of cool research projects I worked on in the past including projects related to the position I was applying for, Google's culture fit, strong desire to be a part of Google. I did very well during the phone interview and was invited for the onsite part. I think onsite interviews (4) went very well too. What really surprised me is that interviewers asked lots of questions about my experience. Problem solving part was not very challenging. This was a little bit disappointing. Tasks were routine and not very well though-out. Solving a difficult problem you have a chance to shine. When you are dealing with an easy problem it's all just about how fast and accurate you are in white-boarding. I cannot say I was absolutely perfect, but I am sure I did not fail any single part, although sometimes I experienced problem understanding what the interviewer really wanted to see. Interviewers were nice and friendly. I did not have the feeling I was dealing with stars. Several times interviewers were even not up to speed with my ideas and my concern is they might not be able to record everything accurately. I was waiting for the feedback for 3 weeks. By this time I already had an offer from a big Google's competitor, but I was patiently waiting for the "job of my dream". I don't know what really happened during these 3 weeks. According to the recruiter, she was collecting interviewer's responses. It strange, since it sounds like my case has not even reached the hiring committee. After 3 weeks the recruiter scheduled a call where she told me they would not move forward with my candidature, because "I did not walk through problems well enough". I do not agree with this conclusion, since I got the opposite impression from my interview. My guess – the reason for the rejection was something else. After all I am extremely disappointed. My recommendation to other candidates: think twice before applying for a position at Google. It takes too long and the result is very unpredictable. They are not just looking for smart/skilled/passionate. Evidently there are some hidden criteria. And don't trust Google's articles and videos about their recruiting process too much. They present their understanding of the perfect recruiting process. The reality is very different. The other advise is try not to spend too much time describing your experience and asking questions. You have only 45 minutes and you will need this time to work on algorithmic problems. I typically had no more than 25-30 minutes left for problem solving and I was usually given 2 tasks. Note that coming up with a right idea and implementing the main functionality is not considered a complete solution. For the record they want to see 100% completed code. If you've run out of time just because the task selected by the interviewer was too large for the timeframe, it's your problem. Interviewer is always right. The phrase "did not walk through problems well enough" in my case could easily mean "proposed the right solution for the second problem, but did not finish writing the code in time".