On recruiting “cold calls”
Google grew by more than 16,000 people between 2005 and 2009 -- a five fold increase in the size of our company. In fact, we were hiring so fast that on average 40 new recruits were joining every day by 2007. At the same time, we were also building partnerships with other technology companies to help improve our products and services.
In order to maintain a good working relationship with these companies, in 2005 we decided not to “cold call” employees at a few of our partner companies. Our policy only impacted cold calling, and we continued to recruit from these companies through LinkedIn, job fairs, employee referrals, or when candidates approached Google directly. In fact, we hired hundreds of employees from the companies involved during this time period.
A number of other tech companies had similar “no cold call” policies -- policies which the U.S. Justice Department has been investigating for the past year. Earlier today, the Justice Department announced a settlement with several of these companies -- including Google -- which brings the investigation to a close. While there’s no evidence that our policy hindered hiring or affected wages, we abandoned our “no cold calling” policy in late 2009 once the Justice Department raised concerns, and are happy to continue with this approach as part of this settlement.