As a Stanford undergraduate, Google News’ Stacie Chan told Texas State students during this year’s Mass Comm Week that she dreamed of becoming a broadcast journalist for the Lakers.
But as Chan completed multimedia assignments to satisfy requirements for her communications bachelor’s she began to realize that she may be best suited for a job in the tech industry.
This was made more apparent after completing a master’s at Stanford and working for three years as a reporter for the AOL journalism venture Patch.
With Patch, Chan said she was not only a reporter, but managed a budget and was a publicist.
“It was every job you could have in a newsroom rolled into one,” she said.
Chan said she believes that the primary reason Google hired her was because of the characteristics her work with Patch exemplified: that’s she’s a self-starter, extremely passionate and gets things done.
At Google, she said, employees are working a number of projects simultaneously without anyone telling them what to do.
“Every waking hour I just wanted to keep working because I wanted to expand this brand. It was my own news site,” said Chan about her time with Patch. “I launched it myself. I was really proud of what I had built.”
On Quitting Patch:
A Stanford alumni event brought her face-to-face with a Google News employee.
Chan said she was “genuinely interested” in what he had to say and about his job, so she got his business card, which she still has, although it’s wrinkled now.
“Networking is such a loaded word…,” she said. “(T)alk to people whose jobs you think you’d love to have, that’s what networking really is…”
To Chan, the quality of Patch’s content was decreasing and she felt like the company wasn’t the place for her anymore, she said.
Blame it on intuition, but the week after her last day with Patch, the company’s middle-management was laid off — a fate that would have been her’s if she wouldn’t have quit.
Three weeks later Chan said she began working with Google and is now its partner operations manager, supporting the thousands of publishers in Google News’ database.
“You never know when a contact’s going to lead to your next job,” she said.
It’s the “informal chats, the talks in the hallway” that count, Chan added, and less about online job portals.
“You want people to think of you whenever a job materializes,” she said. Get a “piece of real estate on their brain.”
Why Google?
Google’s relationship with the media and its affects on the industry played a significant part in Chan’s decision to work for the company, she said.
Chan said her journalism background has helped her relationships with the media publishers she works with because she understands what it’s like to not have an article “crawled” in Google. She added that she’s the only person on her team with journalism training.
Throughout her time with Google, she said she’s come to better understand the importance of being familiar with HTML.
“It’s important to have some familiarity with code,” said Chan because journalists are likely to speak with an engineer “and frankly you don’t want to sound dumb.”
The Google Hiring Process:
Chan said she heard “so many myths” about the Google hiring process, like this former interview question: How many jelly beans could fit in the Empire State Building?
These “ridiculous questions” were asked, she said, to gain a better idea about a candidate’s thought process.
To get to this point in the hiring process, Chan said you “generally have to know someone on the inside,” someone that can serve as a personal “sponsor.”
“Google hires people who can look at their current lay of the land, scale their products down and do a better job than people are currently doing,” she said.
It took Chan seven interview rounds before she was hired.
“It was quite rigorous.”
Google News’ Criteria:
“Quite rigorous standards, I would say,” Chan said.
Media outlets must be a news source that produces original content to be considered by Google News, she said.
Chan emphasized the fact that Twitter is a news platform, not a news source.