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How do Facebook, Google and Tesla hire?

In Hiring Strategy — by Dave Anderson

Every company needs to have a team of great employees. But there are a handful of well-known brands that strive to hire the brightest minds available. Companies like Facebook, Google and Tesla have built seamless hiring processes for identifying top-tier talent among the mass of applicants they receive.

If you recruit and hire for your company, you likely wonder what you can learn from these companies. We scoured the internet to find out how these companies approach hiring in order to bring on the best people available.

How does Facebook hire?

Jobs at Facebook are some of the most sought after in Silicon Valley. They have massive, beautiful campus in Menlo Park and provide employees the opportunity to work on a website a huge portion of the world visits daily.

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From the candidate’s perspective, the hiring process at Facebook is typical yet thorough. It starts with phone interviews with recruiters and potential team members. After that, candidates visit the campus for a series of in-person interviews and a tour. The tour is to make candidates feel welcome and help them relax before they sit down to answer questions.

However, Facebook’s hiring process is built to efficiently find the best person for the job among the mass of applicants they consider. Engineers and developers are asked to complete either a take home or whiteboard coding tests. The questions are designed to be simple enough to explain and should take no more than 30 minutes to solve. Interviewers are also asked to consider how the candidate approaches the problems, in addition to the answers they give.

For both tech and non-tech roles, Facebook values candidates with diverse experience. Since the company is constantly innovating, they look for people who can step into new roles with different teams as needed.

The hiring team at Facebook uses an internal solution to submit feedback on candidates. They’re asked the summarize how the interview went, give a “yes” or “no” on if the person should be hired and answer how confident they are in their decision on a four-point scale. After the feedback is submitted, each hiring team members can see how others answered. Final hiring decisions are made by a committee of the hiring manager and directors who take the interviewers reviews into account and weigh other factors like the candidate’s desired compensation.

How does Google hire?

Google was once known for asking riddle-like brainteasers during interviewers. However, they decided those questions were a poor predictor of a candidate’s ability to be a successful employee and now rely on evaluation tests and structured interview questions.

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Like Facebook, Google’s hiring process is designed for efficiency because they get so many applicants. The company receives over one million applications each year but is only able to hire fewer than one percent of those people.

For engineering roles, candidates often do not interview with specific teams. They instead submit their application and are evaluated by engineers from different departments who are randomly selected to participate in the hiring process. The goal is to involve a variety of employees and maintain a high standard of hiring.

The interview process at Google starts with standard phone screenings before moving onto rigorous in-person interviews. Candidates spend the entire day on the Google campus or one of the satellite offices. It’s common for interviewers to ask a series of behavioral and situational questions although they do have some leeway in the exact questions they chose.

Google also uses coding tests to evaluate candidates for technical roles. Unlike Facebook, candidates must complete the exercise during the interview instead of taking it home. And most the exercises are done on a whiteboard or even paper so the candidate can show their work and give insight into their thinking. Since doing away with the brainteaser questions, Google has found that these tests are the best way to make quality hires for technical roles.

Another similarity Google has with Facebook is hiring team members use an internal system to rank candidates on a four-point scale. A hiring committee uses an aggregate of the rankings to come to a final decision, while also taking other factors into consideration.

How does Tesla hire?

In recent years, Tesla has joined Facebook and Google among the innovative companies that seek the brightest minds out there. And their hiring process is a bit different than the other tech companies in Silicon Valley.

The company is known for testing candidates’ resolve through challenging interviews. In some cases, candidates are asked to give a presentation to the hiring team on a project they worked on in a previous role. They then take questions on their presentation before participating in one-on-one interviews related to the role.

Interview questions at Tesla are known for being pointed. Candidates are asked if they’re really up for the challenge and told no one is going to hold their hand if they’re hired. They make it clear that the company has plenty of candidates to consider and each one needs to make the case for why they’re the best one for the job. That might sound harsh but Tesla employees say their voices and ideas really are heard so it makes sense that the company is diligent when hiring.

For technical roles, candidates are asked to complete tests and evaluation exercises. Unlike Facebook and Google, Tesla’s tests often focus on physics and mechanical engineering instead of strictly computer coding. There are anecdotes on Quora of people claiming to have gotten perfect scores and not receiving offers which supports the idea that the candidate’s thinking and approach matters as much as their answer.

So beyond being brilliant, what else does Telsa value in their candidates? The company’s founder Elon Musk has stated in multiple media interviews that he strives to hire people who want to revolutionize the way we live. Many tech companies claim to make the world a better place through innovation but Tesla – and its sister companies SpaceX and SolarCity – really are trying to improve humanity and our planet.

What hiring lessons can you learn from Facebook, Google and Tesla?

The companies mentioned in this article all have the advantage of being popular brands that many people dream of working for. That means they have to efficiently screen all their applicants to uncover the best of the bunch. They do so by having a well-established hiring process and clearly defining what they value in the people they hire, regardless of the individual role.

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