Google starts with a phone call from a recruiter. If the recruiter determines that you may be a good match, they set up interviews with the department they are recruiting for. You then go through a few rounds of interviews with the department staff and managers. I was called because I submitted a resume through Google's job site, but they actually called me to interview for a different job than what I had applied for. So it seems their recruiting system is good at matching your resume to other opportunities at the company, even if you didn't apply directly for the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The most difficult question was during the initial phone call with the recruiter. She asked me to describe the business process of creating and distributing media. This threw me because it's not a simple question or answer. I know a lot about media distribution and knew that trying to answer with any kind of detail would take up much more than the amount of time we scheduled for the call. Upon reflection, I assume perhaps the question was designed to test my communication skills and ability to boil a lot of information into small useful bits (and to keep my audience in mind when constructing my answer). But the question still threw me because the scope and complexity of a "good" answer didn't seem appropriate for the scheduled interview time or audience. And I didn't know how much or little the recruiter knew about media distribution, so it was hard to tailor my answer on the fly.