I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Google (Irvine, CA) in Sep 2012
Interview
I submitted my application through a friend who works at Google. I was contacted by the recruiter the very next day. The recruiter was very informative and detailed the entire interview process. They also give you questions to prep in advance.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
For a PM position, Google wants to understand your thought process. Even though the questions were very general, I felt they asked me a lot of technical questions (i.e. algorithms)
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.
Overall a lot of steps to the interview process. Talked to different people and had opportunities to ask questions. Many different stages which made it a lengthy process overall. Wasn't too bad.