It happens all the time. The first couple of interviews are just a phone screen. After the on-sites the packet goes to a committee, always, which makes the final decision having read all the feedbacks from all the interviews. The hiring committee isn't some last moment check/balance, it's the primary way hiring decisions are made. Or at least that's how it worked when I was an interviewer at Google.

When I applied one year ago, my recruiter reviewed feedback of on-site interviews before passing it to the committee (which she decided not to do in my case).

From what I understand, reruiters are rated based on the quality of candidates they pass to the hiring committee, so they have an incentive to only let the best pass.

From my understanding, the recruiter has the option of outright rejecting you after your interview without passing it on to the hiring committee. Generally if your feedback is even vaguely positive, they'll pass it on though, so if you get rejected by the recruiter, it's usually pretty cut and dry.

This may vary depending on the office involved.

I applied for an SWE position @ Google back in 2015.

I was also rejected at the committee level, the reason was that I didn't have the amount of domain knowledge they wanted; in my case it was estimation theory/signal processing.

About 80% gets rejected at the committee stage, it is the executive review after the committee that rarely rejects.

I was a bit pissed that the way the recruiter told me initially I thought the hiring committee was just a safety check and pretty much a rubber stamp so I got all excited for abut a day until he told me I didn't pass the committee. He gave me no feedback whatsoever about interviews or anything, just encouraged me to apply in a year, which may be standard talk for all candidates (he did invite me later to an online seminar so there's hope).

The way I understand it now is that besides gauging your expertise level and general review they may simply select the top X for the positions they have, given a larger number of candidates that passed the interviews.

I didn't see anything that seemed to discriminate by age. One interviewer was a woman in her 40s ro 50s. That said it is true that Silicon Valley (I also interviewed for Facebook) is all white or Asian men in their late 20s or early 30s, (with some sparse women). I saw literally zero black people in three days in SV and the only obvious Hispanic were the staff at my hotel.

There was a miscommunication. The recruiter intended to communicate that "VP-level committee is usually a safety check and pretty much a rubber stamp". That's the review layer above the main Hiring Committee.

If you got rejected by VP committee, that is unusual and work grumbling about -- and possibly constrained by amount of funding available for new hires.

The "come back in a year" is absolutely honest. Many people are hired a year, or 2, or 3 later. Google is happy to say "not sure / not yet" to people and "yes" later.

somewhere I read that "come back next year" for the specific position I applied is actually a common thing they do since they like to see persistence and growth, so that's looking good.

Sounds like the recruiter made a mistake. The committee rejects the vast majority. The executive review committee that comes after accepts most, though.

yes, that somehow makes me feel better (rather than almost all passed but me), I guess in the media they all focus so much in the legendary Google interview that so few people pass, they forgot to mention the committee. My one bad taste of the experience was that one day (thankfully it could have been worse) I thought I had made it.

The committee is how you "pass" the interview. Only awful interview performances are rejected on interview scores alone, before committee. Committee reduces the set of interview scores into a single decision.

That's actually the reason I got confused with the original comment I replied to. The author said he 'passed' the interview and then got rejected by committee, and the only committee 'after' passing the interview is the VP/SVP review. In reality he did not actually passed the interview, he might have just gotten a relatively good feedback from the interviewers.

recruiter literally emailed me "congratulations, you passed the interviews", before committee so that's very confusing, what did I pass then, a low filter?