I was contacted by a recruiter via email after not getting any response from multiple applications to Google years before.

After a brief phone call with the recruiter, I took several months to practice for the interview process and was passed to another recruiter.

The first interview was a phone interview with an engineer. It went well and was low-stress. I advanced to the next round, which was the onsite process.

My recruiter offered to set up a mock interview with an engineer, which I appreciated. It was a phone interview, and that went as well as the previous phone interview.

After a couple more weeks of studying, I did the onsite, which consisted of five interviews: four technical and one behavioral. As the day progressed, the technical interviews got harder, which was probably a coincidence but also maybe by design. The behavioral interview was fine and just the standard questions.

I received feedback that I was able to move on to the next round, team matching, surprisingly quickly, essentially the next day.

The team match process was cool in that I got to learn about a lot of teams at Google. Fortunately, I matched with a team and was hired.

Overall, the process was smooth and less stressful than other processes I have been through. The recruiters I worked with were really great, and everyone I interacted with was nice.

I practiced every day using LeetCode and a lot with "Cracking the Coding Interview." To a lesser extent, I also used "Programming Interviews Exposed" (all for free), which were all immensely helpful.

None of the questions I was asked were directly pulled from any of these resources, except the mock interview questions. I wouldn't say any of the questions I was asked were super similar to anything I came across while using these resources.

This is all to say I would focus on concepts, like graph traversal and sorting, more than solving specific Google questions on LeetCode, which is still good practice.