Girls in Tech recently organized a tour of the Google LA Office and there was no way I was missing this. I’ve not visited the Google headquarters so I was really excited about this one. We all met up near the Starbucks at Trojan Grounds on 19th at around 10:30am. It was a beautiful day. The office is located in Venice and one of the crazy perks of working here is that the Venice Beach is just a 5 minute walk from the office. So naturally, you can expect a lot of electric scooters and surf boards.
The entire office is divided into 7 buildings or 7 bins as they refer to them and the office has around 1200 happy employees. Fab, who handles student outreach and university programs for Google, hosted us and took us around the office. He’s been working for Google since 2012 and outside of his work, he does stand up comedy! How cool is that?! He gave us an insight into the things they look for in potential interns/employees. One of the things he mentioned was that they really care about the way we think about a problem and the way we approach it. Leadership skills and involvement in student clubs (academic/non-academic) are really important because this shows that you are a self starter. It’s also very important to have a good knowledge about the role you’re applying for.
One of the first things that recruiters at Google see about the candidates is their resume. So it is extremely important to make your resume stand out. They don’t want a description about your position in your previous jobs, instead they would love to read about what you accomplished there. “My Personal Formula for a Winning Resume” is a popular article by Laszlo Bock. In this article he talks about a simple formula that can be used to talk about your previous experiences and that formula is: Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y] by doing [Z].
Some of the other things Fab recommended was that, it’s always better to limit the resume to 1-2 pages. He also suggests that if you are working on projects outside of your classes, it’s better to have a separate section titled Personal Projects. This can really help your resume. And its extremely important to mention your expected graduation date. You would be surprised but some trivial things like missing expected graduation date, key courses etc, can actually result in our application getting rejected because they receive tons of applications and they won’t really have time to reach out to the applicant to get this information.
We didn’t really get a tour of the entire office because of time constraint. So I really look forward to going back again. If you have any questions about the opportunities at Google LA, you can email uscstudents@google.com.
Thanks to Girls in Tech for the great picture and I look forward to many more events organised by them.
Published on January 24th, 2018
Last updated on January 24th, 2018