Every tech firm wants the best data scientists and AI experts on their team. Meta’s famous multi-million dollar salary packages for experts from its rivals like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others stole the headlines last month, whereas Elon Musk’s xAI has also been involved in similar practices. However, Google has done something weird of late. Have you heard of the incident when Google’s India team poached one of its own employees?
In a bizarre turn of events that has gone viral across the tech world, a senior Google scientist has revealed that the company’s own recruitment team attempted to “poach” him from his current role at Google. The incident, which was shared via a social media post, has sparked a debate about the aggressive automated hiring practices in the technology sector.
Google offers job to its own employee
Raj Dabre, the scientist working at Google, shared the unusual experience in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Dabre stated that a Google recruiter had reached out to him with an offer to join a team in Google India, seemingly unaware that he was already a long-time employee of the company. The post included a screenshot of the recruitment email, which quickly became a source of amusement and disbelief for the tech community.
In a follow-up post, however, Dabre provided a possible explanation for the mix-up. He clarified that he doesn’t maintain a LinkedIn profile and hasn’t updated his personal website in some time. This could have led Google’s automated or third-party recruiting tools to mistake him for an external candidate. He said that the mistake was “not the recruiter’s fault,” suggesting the issue lay with the broader system.
Has AI hiring gone too far?
Although Dabre’s story is seen in a humorous light, it brings to light a serious aspect of the ongoing AI talent war. As tech firms fiercely compete to acquire top talent for staying ahead in the AI race, their hiring processes have become too dependent on AI tools and aggressive outreach. In this case, Google’s hiring division solely relied on the online data available instead of doing its own research to look up more details. What’s even more concerning is if this was done by an automated AI tool, it failed to look up the details in its database.
Hence, this goes on to show that no matter how advanced modern automated tools may become, you always need human oversight in roles like this to poach the right people.
