The recruiter called me at the scheduled time.

She was very friendly and began by asking about my background and interests.

We discussed my previous work experience, the projects I was most proud of, and why I was interested in working at Google.

She also provided a detailed overview of the interview process and what to expect in the upcoming stages.

The conversation lasted about 30 minutes and ended with us scheduling my first technical phone interview.

The interviewer, a Google software engineer, was very professional and put me at ease right away. He presented a coding problem and asked me to solve it using a shared coding platform.

The problem was related to data structures and algorithms, something I had prepared extensively for. I explained my thought process as I wrote the code, and he asked follow-up questions to understand my approach better.

I was able to solve the problem efficiently, and we even had a bit of time left to discuss optimization techniques.