Chasing Top Talent at the Google Games

By Miguel Helft

On a spring Saturday, about 90 students from Stanford and as many from the University of California converged on Google’s corporate campus for a day of spirited team competition over mind-bending puzzles, Lego building and video games. It was called the Google Games, a convivial way for the students, mostly computer science and engineering majors, to renew the Stanford-Berkeley rivalry.

But behind the fun was a deadly serious corporate recruiting event that underscores a rivalry no less intense: the tug of war for talent between Google and its competitors.

As much of the high-tech industry enjoys a renewed boom, the fight to attract top recruits in computer engineering and other fields is as intense as it has ever been.

Companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo frequently find themselves going after the same candidates or recruiting in each other’s backyards.

At the same time, they are running up against a myriad of start- up companies across Silicon Valley that have been pumped up with venture capital in recent years.

To lure talent, these companies have expanded their recruiting arsenal far beyond the traditional job fair to include a growing number of events like technology lectures, cocktail parties, pizza parties, treasure hunts and programming contests, dubbed "code jams" or "hack days." Much like the Google Games, these are no-pressure recruiting occasions meant to create buzz over their companies and impress potential recruits as young as first-year college students.

"It comes down to just getting them introduced to our culture, showing them that, hey, being part of Google could be a lot of fun," said Ken Krieger, a Google engineer who volunteered to supervise the Lego-building contest.

Google, more than any other company, looms large in this latest chapter of Silicon Valley’s talent wars.

The company has been scooping up talent wherever it can find it to keep fueling its torrid growth. Its work force has doubled every year for the past several years, to more than 12,200 at the end of March. Google is now adding about 500 workers each month. Its Web site lists nearly 800 open positions in the San Francisco Bay area alone.

The class of 2007 seems to think that a Google job offer is a prized commodity. Stories about Google’s notoriously tough and sometimes off-putting recruiting process continue to surface.

Even so, the company was the most desirable employer for U.S. undergraduates this year, and for the first time, it edged out the consulting firm McKinsey as the most desirable employer among graduates with a degree of master’s in business administration. It was a position McKinsey had held for the past 12 years, according to surveys conducted by Universum.

"Being in an environment where you are going to learn a lot is the most important thing to me," said Alice Yu- shan Chang, one of hundreds of top recruits who are graduating this year and heading for Google.

Chang, who is finishing a double master’s degree in computer science and management science at Stanford, was recruited by both Microsoft and Google, as well as eBay and Oracle. She said Microsoft did what it could to find the right group for her, first at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington and then, upon learning that she did not want to leave the San Francisco Bay area, at its Mountain View campus, a stone’s throw away from Google’s. She received phone calls from Microsoft vice presidents and had a face-to-face meeting with one of them.

"With Google, you don’t have that much face time with high-up people," she said. But there was some wining and dining on the part of Google, which Chang would not discuss in detail because she had signed a nondisclosure agreement. Eventually, Google won, in part because it would permit Chang to rotate positions every six months in the first year and half.

"There are a lot of young people there who are very creative," Chang, 25, said. Many of her peers at Microsoft would have been in their 30s and 40s "and more family oriented," she said.

In the past two years, Google has expanded its university recruiting programs to nearly 200 campuses from about 70, and it is holding an increasing number of campus recruiting drives. But its popularity with students and the ubiquity of its recruiting events have ruffled some feathers.

Max Levchin , a co-founder of PayPal and now the chief executive of Slide, a technology start-up in San Francisco, said he used to have good luck recruiting from his alma mater, the University of Illinois, by going there in midyear and persuading top computer- science students to defer graduation and join him in Silicon Valley.

"Now all I hear about is Google holding a puzzle hunt this, or Google campus pizza that," Levchin said in an interview conducted by instant messaging.

Richard Skrenta, the chief executive of another start-up, Topix.net, also known as Zandica, said he had successfully recruited from his alma mater, the California Institute of Technology, in previous years.

"This year, it was a shutout," Skrenta said. He blamed Google for his lack of success.

Stanford does not keep an official tally of where its students go, and even informal numbers are not in for the class of 2007. But a voluntary survey of students showed that Stanford had funneled more of its graduates to Google than to any other employer in the past three years.

While playing down the rivalry with Microsoft, which is hiring even faster than Google, albeit into a company nearly seven times as large, Google has not shied away from bringing the competition for talent to Microsoft’s door. Google has more openings in the Seattle area than anywhere else in the United States except California and New York.

"I think it’s unlikely that you’ll see us back up a truck to their parking lot," said Judy Gilbert, director of staffing programs at Google. "We have done a lot of things to engage with the local talent in an appropriate way."

As an example, Gilbert, a former recruiter for McKinsey, pointed to a lecture earlier this year at Google by Kaifu Lee, president of Google Greater China, which was intended to appeal to the "large community of Chinese expats" in the Seattle area. Lee used to head Microsoft’s research organization in China. After Google hired him in 2005, Microsoft sued Lee, accusing him of violating a noncompetition agreement. The lawsuit was later settled.

Companies say their toughest recruiting challenges come from start-ups that snap up people like Nitay Joffe.

"I had the mind-set that I was going to graduate and go to Google," said Joffe, a recent graduate of the University of California at San Diego who majored in computer engineering. He had summer internships at Google for the past two years.

But before he took a job with Google, a friend suggested he check out a San Francisco start-up, Powerset, which is trying to build a rival search engine.

"Powerset had everything that Google had in terms of what I was looking for – smart people, interesting projects, great amenities," Joffe said. But Powerset also had one thing that Google could not offer: the potential to strike it rich with the Internet equivalent of a lottery ticket.

"When you get a stock option at 5 cents and it goes to $50 . . . ," Joffe said before adding, "Google isn’t going to $4,000." With Google’s shares hovering around $460 or higher, it no longer offers the same potential.