"They go around the internet looking for candidates who look like they are pretty smart (insightful blog posts, open source contributions, etc), however they don't always have the deep technical ability to differentiate people who would and would not be a good fit for Google."

I once created a LinkedIn account to see someone's profile. It was meant to be a throwaway but I didn't delete it. The account had no activity, no "insightful blog posts", no open source contributions, nothing but a single job listing under a previous position.

Not being a real person, nobody contacted this account... except google recruiters. And they did it persistently. It was right out of glengarry glenross. They were very smug, which I thought was amusing because, well, they were chasing a non-existent entity. (even if I didn't have my own startup, I have no interest in ever working for google.)

When I didn't answer the first recruiter, after many emails, I was handed off to another guy who felt this event was significant enough to send me, yet another email about it. In it one of the things he said was: "I identify top-tier engineers for Google"

Of course, when looking at his profile, his background is in recruiting, not engineering, and his degree is in accounting, not engineering. (No disrespect to accountants.)

I'm completely burned out on recruiter hyperbole, and absolutely have spent the last conversation I'll ever have with a non-technical recruiter whose trying to "evaluate" me. Here's how the last one went (before I started refusing to deal with recruiters, which, by the way, produced better job leads and better jobs.)

Her: Do you have oracle experience? (having not told me anything about the job, other than it was a "coder" job.)
Me: Well, I was writing java that generated SQL dynamically to talk to an oracle database. The SQL had to be dynamic because...
Her: (interrupting) which oracle?
Me: Uh, the one from Oracle corporation.
Her: What was the version number
Me: (just because I'd happened to see it in passing) 8i I believe.
Her: OH, sorry, the client wants 9i experience. (9i, I later discovered had been released within the previous 3 months.) I'll keep you in mind and let you know if I find anything that matches your level of qualifications. (From tone of voice, it was obvious I wasn't "up to speed" in her eyes.)

Later I was awarded a patent as sole inventor for the technology I'd tried to describe in her question.

Anyway, getting tired of constant emails from google recruiters, and irritated at this non-engineers belief that he "identifies" "top flight" engineers, I asked him what he looks for in a phone interview.

Here's a direct quote of his answer. Because this is obvious nonsense (he can't evaluate any of these things from the perspective of an accountant) he's clearly just playing buzzword bingo, and in the hopes of getting other engineers past this fake "evaluation" to talk to real engineers, this is all you have to say:

"The l things I look for when I'm having a phone conversation with an engineer (at a high level):
- What big problems are they solving (large scalability and storage issues, advanced algorithms, etc...)
- Involvement in complete product development (are they shipping products or are mainly doing integration)
- Technical coding, % of time they spend coding, languages they're coding in.
- use of data structures and algorithm writing.
- Educational background and motivation for making a change."

Note that "I got tired of being harassed by google recruiters" is probably not a good answer for the last one.

From the original article:
"I guess that’s why when I interviewed for my transfer, I was told I was “not technical enough” to do the job I’d been doing for 3 years already, supporting the Freebase community."

Google literally told this guy he was not capable of doing the job he was already doing, and given that it was a startup, a job he had likely created himself.

"There are plenty of fresh-faced kids from Stanford and MIT and whatever other elite universities are on Google’s preferred list, who can solve stupid puzzles and tell you the O notation of anything you want."

Well, when your founders were graduate students at Stanford, and they implemented a hiring policy right out of school, it shouldn't be surprising that they have an arbitrary filter like that, and a focus on identifying personalities that are nearly identical to the founders.

Finding people like yourself is orthogonal to finding good employees who will find the best position. In the worst case it can result in a monoculture where literally every employee is blind to a solution that would be obvious to at least somebody if you had more diversity.

I've not worked with google, so obviously I'm just giving my impressions based on my experiences being recruited by them (and this has happened ore than once, the LinkedIn example was just the most recent.)