I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Sep 2012
Interview
Summary: You had better know the technology inside & out - at a much greater level of detail than a Project Manager would ever need. Basically they are looking for Engineers who want to give Project Management a shot.
Details: I was contacted by a recruiter at Google about an opportunity with the company. Went through a couple phone screen type calls with him before moving onto the next step which was a phone interview with another Project Manager. This phone interview lasted 45 mins & did not discuss anything about project management, it was only technical questions. I passed that interview (but was skeptical about the job really being "Project Management") and was asked to fly out to Mountain View for 5 hours of face to face interviews.
The vast majority of the questions through the face to face interviews were technical just like the original phone interview- not really concerned about Project Management skillsets. Again, very bizarre considering that the title of the position was Project Manager (albeit a Technical Project Manager but still). I would say that 95% of all questions I received were technical with the other 5% being general management type questions (not a single question that was pure project management).
Google really does only care about your technical skill sets even for project managers - but who am I to argue with them, they are taking over the world. :) That being said I made it perfectly clear in my phone interview that my technical skill sets are my weakest, yet they moved forward with the interview. If technical skills were 95% of the job requirements they should have been able to weed me out a lot earlier in the process (before having to travel for face to face interviews).
After 1.5 weeks I received a "Dear John" call from the recruiter saying that there just wasn't a fit. I was completely fine with this because there was very little they could have done to convince me to take the job after the interview questioning I went through. I knew it wasn't a fit for either of us.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Basically explaining how the technology works down to a really detailed level.
standard 1st round digital interview, they are asking about your experience, background, some behavioural questions and technical questions. and they also share a bit more about the role, culture and expectation
Very self-driven, first of multiple rounds, where I had to take the initiative to arrive at the problem, constraints, approach, solutions, tradeoffs and reasoning behind it in a matter of 30 minutes.
You would have to do a hiring assessment first, then a recruiter screening follows. First round interview with the hiring manager. Majorly product sense and product improvement. The questions were not direct though.