It seems the only stories you hear of them are interviewing people and then ghosting them. If they actually cared about hiring people you figure at least they would treat their candidates better. In my experience even amazon has been more on the ball with the recruiting process.
I'm not particularly fond of Google or the way they interview, but I've lived just a few blocks from their Cambridge office (so almost every engineer I know around here has interviewed there at one point or another).
Aside for their criterias and interview questions which I find absurd (but that's subjective, I know a bunch of people who think they're fine), I haven't heard much that was really wrong with it aside for obviously underqualified candidates being brought in and then leaving pissed off after bombing it.
The reality is that in this industry right now, unless what you're doing is little webapps with REST apis that store/retrieve data and not much else, hiring people is hard. All the somewhat large companies have 100+ openings at any given time and the majority of candidates are code monkeys. My current employer is doing decently and our reputation seems to allow us to get a steady stream of above average people applying, but there's still so many openings.
