In a recent talk to The Forum for In-House Recruitment Managers (The FIRM), Google recruiters described their “consensus-based hiring” approach in which potential peers participate in hiring committees of as many as “six or seven people”. “Everyone gets involved,” said one of the recruiters. To ensure that line managers and peers can participate effectively in recruiting, “interview training is one of the first training classes people take at Google”, one of the recruiters said. Refresher training is also offered.

The company is keen to ensure that its workforce is diverse, and that interviewers can gauge, without interference from cultural barriers, a candidate’s appropriateness for a job at Google. “People have different ways of looking at things,” it was explained.

The recruiter added: “We’re working with diversity on the age side at the moment.”

The recruiters from the notoriously tight-lipped information gathering giant also emphasised that every application is reviewed by a human. Candidate referrals from other employees are the company’s “lifeblood”, the recruiters said.

Currently, Google has 50 offices around the world and “a couple hundred recruiters”. At the end of last month, the company was “expanding its base of recruitment talent” and, one recruiter said, was “hiring very, very aggressively at the moment”.