How I aced my interviews and received an offer from Google BizOps
I applied to Google BizOps after gaining a few years of work experience after undergrad, and thanks to a combination of careful preparation and luck, I was successful! To any aspiring business person interested in tech, landing a job at Google BizOps is amazing. I will unpack the process below and share my tips for the entire application and interview process.
What is Google BizOps
The Google BizOps team plays an important role in defining and driving strategic, operational, and organizational improvements at Google. Think of the team as an internal SWAT team that parachutes in to help solve some of the most pressing and key projects that the business faces, both by coming up with the strategic solution and helping make sure that it’s implemented correctly.
While there are other strategy teams at Google, the BizOps team is the one that is the most truly cross-functional. For example, the BizOps team is the one that is tapped when a problem spans multiple business units and needs a higher-level lens to come up with a solution.
Because of this, the team is highly regarded at Google and seen as the ‘launching pad’ for many Google careers. The nature of the BizOps projects necessitates working with senior leaders at Google, who frequently ‘internally poach’ BizOps talent for their own organizations, accelerating career development by years, if not decades.
Google application process
I started by filling out the application on the Google website and preparing a thoughtful resume that highlighted my strengths and professional impact (the “resume” chapter in a book called Case Closed was particularly helpful in guiding how I should write my resume). About two weeks later, I received an email from Google HR informing me that a recruiter wanted to connect.
The entire process took about 5 weeks. After the call with the recruiter, I had my first round of interviews, which consisted of two interviews. At this round, candidates are typically interviewed by a director, principal, or associate.. About a week after the first round, I heard back from the Google HR recruiter that the interviewers had provided positive feedback and I would advance to the second round. My second round interview was with a senior leader of the BizOps organization, after which about another week elapsed before the recruiter informed me that my case would be presented to Google’s Hiring Committee for a formal offer letter and compensation package.
My application and interview preparation
I started with some of the older consulting books such as “Case in Point” to understand what a case interview meant. These books helped me to reach about 30% of where I wanted to be in terms of my case solving skills. I still fumbled a lot with which case framework to use when, and honestly, could not quite keep it straight with all the different bullet points that are associated with each case framework, simply because there were so many! After the first few practice cases, the answers for the subsequent cases were also really brief and not very educational.
This is when I read “Case Closed” and it helped me up my case interview game tremendously! It had great reviews and I heard about it from a friend who had used it and loved it. It was also written in the last 2 years vs. the other consulting books that are fairly outdated. I also enlisted a friend to run a case with me every other day for two weeks and I felt like my case interview skills improved a lot during that short period of time. “Case Closed” really distills case interviews down to four main frameworks, which was really helpful when I was trying to practice a particular framework. I also better understood what problem solving meant and the basics of case interviewing, which enabled me to feel confident no matter what case was tossed my way (e.g., a case about a food truck in Washington D.C. that was very unconventional).
During the case interview prep period, one of the important things to keep in mind is to constantly be absorbing feedback and trying to improve on those areas in the next practice case! If you just keep doing the same things over and over again, you won’t be improving. This is where I found my case partner’s feedback to be most helpful.
I did all 17 practice case interviews from Case Closed and felt really confident going into my interviews. I would recommend taking each practice case interview seriously because they are modeled after actual cases from McKinsey, Bain, and BCG!
Google HR tips and tricks
During my interviews, the HR questions were rather routine. It’s more about them gauging how well we might fit in with the team culture. They asked me questions such as:
- Tell me about yourself
- Why are you interested in this role
- Help me understand what you do in your current role
- Why are you interested in technology
- Other resume related questions
There is a section in Case Closed that gives a list of all such potential questions. This was really helpful because I prepared bullet points for each potential question and I would highly recommend doing that so you’re not unstructured in your answer even though these questions are about yourself!
Tips for the interview day
A mentor once told me, “As much as they are interviewing you, you are interviewing them as well! You need to figure out if you would enjoy working with these people and in such a workplace.” This helped me immensely because it helped to frame my mindset as more of an equal with my Google interviewers — i.e., it’s not just that they can reject me, but I can also reject them. I felt more in control and that boosted my confidence as well.
The day before the interviews, I didn’t do any practice cases and essentially rested from any interview prep. On the day itself, I went through my previous case practice notes. I also gave myself a quick pep talk while looking at the mirror and told myself, “The worst that can happen is they don’t give you an offer. So what, there are lots of other great firms out there. Just go in there and do your best!”
The prep I had done, which made me feel confident while interviewing, as well as this interview day attitude helped me to actually enjoy the interviews. I think my interviewers could tell that I was having fun and genuinely enjoyed problem solving.
I hope this article helped give you some insight into the Google BizOps application process! Good luck with your interviews!
