My overall interview experience was great. I enjoyed the process and everyone I met. It was a lot of fun. I was handed off between more than four recruiters during the screening and interview process, which was a little concerning. All of the people I spoke with were very professional and courteous.
I was offered two positions and asked to select one.
My third recruiter sent me a long list of questions to complete, including my complete job history since graduating college, if I had any competing offers (which I did, and listed them), references at Google and outside of Google, and a few other things.
It was the last week of March and I was preparing for a 10-day vacation overseas leaving on April 5th. I told my recruiter that since I would be in the Alps, internet connectivity might not be reliable.
My recruiter provided a verbal offer on either March 31 or April 1st of a base salary that was slightly less than what I was making, bonuses, stock, and other items that brought the total value up to about nice amount. The position was a level 5 position as Senior Technical Writer acting as a team lead. We had a verbal agreement, and she said she would have the written offer for me before I left on April 5th.
The recruiter never provided a written offer. She said there were technical issues at first, and then later said there was an issue with the compensation. By the time I left for Austria, I had no written offer and major concerns that the job offer had issues with compensation. Meanwhile, I had asked another company that had made a competing offer to please be patient while I waited on Google's offer for comparison.
On April 7th, I was handed off from one recruiter to another because one of them was transitioning out of recruiting for technical writing.
My new recruiter said that there was indeed an issue with my compensation package. It had never been approved by the hiring committee so they were going to review my position again. I was asked to provide additional writing samples. The recruiter understood that I was on vacation and that I had limited access to any of my writing samples except for the public ones I had already provided. I provided links to publicly available writing samples and explained that my more technical ones were company confidential and could not be shared.
The recruiter called me with an updated offer on April 8th. After reviewing my position and additional writing samples, he said that the hiring committee decided to downgrade the position to a level 4, lower the base pay by $20k, and reduce the overall compensation package by $55k.
I declined the offer. The base salary was $20k less than what I had been offered initially AND Google's offer was significantly less than the two competing base salary offers I had.
The recruiter was apparently unaware of the competing offers even though I had included them in the material I sent to the previous recruiter. Maybe that information wasn't shared in the shuffle from recruiter to recruiter.
The offer felt like an insult since the offer was significantly lower than competing offers, the position level was reduced after viewing samples provided while I was on vacation without access to my real samples, and the overall package offered by Google was reduced $43k. The recruiter apologized multiple times and said that he had never heard of this happening before.
I *never* should have been offered a position at one salary and then have it reduced with the written offer. It's a bait-and-switch in position level and salary. That was not professional and not what I expected from a company like Google. This experience eroded my trust in the hiring process at Google.
It was, by far, the worst experience I have had with position negotiation.