I was initially contacted by a recruiter late November of 2011. I had spent a year aggressively networking and working towards where I knew I belonged. I already had the flight booked for a final interview with Amazon, when a week later, Google, my number one choice by a long shot. Also, for once it was the recruiter reaching out to me, based on my ability to master Google+ quicker than the Engineers who invented it, and I had a lot of ideas of ways to enhance the experience... So, I pulled an immature, last minute no-show on Amazon. I had #1, I don't like to settle. Well, karma... By the time of my final phone interviews, which was going fantastic, I hear nothing from them. Scheduled phone calls missed, no responses to my emails. A few days later, a get a "not sent due to that email address no longer existing." About a month later, I saw that they had left Google --- right in the middle of the process --- and they do not pass on the pending applicants. I was taken out of the system, along with the recruiter... With Google, I've now become good friends with a lot of them, and they realize their system is not as effective, and are making it to where you can soon make a profile about you on their Jobs site, and they will match candidates with relevant Jobs, instead of most large companies method of recruiting, which involves an extremely sensitive applicant tracking system that looks at all of the keywords – meaning that there's a very low chance that your application is even seen by a real person - and if it is, the average amount of time that a person looks before deciding to keep looking or pass is five seconds. So, find the magic combination of keywords, and completely describe yourself in one sentence. Or don't follow any of the rules and go crazy to show just how brilliant you are.