Last year Google’s employment branding reached its peak. Baristas, 20% time off to work on what you want, free gourmet cuisine. Who would want to work anywhere else?
This year, backlash. Every HR blogger out there is telling the story of a Google interview gone bad.
Myself, I don’t care about their employment practices. I would just like their golden egg of an adword system to work better. Wouldn’t you, if you had a $200 billion market cap that was riding on the effectiveness of a single program, want to make that program really easy to use?
This morning I was looking at the Google Adword “day-parting” feature that lets you set higher bids during the day. I’ve been noticing competitors jack up their bids during the daytime hours. I’m not sure why – nighttime leads are just as good from what I’ve seen.
Nevertheless, if the bidding goes up, it goes up, so I have to raise our bids to get the positioning I want.
The day-parting form provides a flip between a basic mode and a bid adjustment mode (see screenshot), except that it doesn’t work anything like what the labels would suggest. To wit, if you decide to investigate the Basic mode, you have to wipe out all your Bid Adjustment mode settings.
Also, you have to go through day by day, hour by hour making your settings. If you run 20 or more campaigns like TempWorks, this can be a real pain. And remember, if you ever decide to look at the alternative mode (Basic), all your settings get wiped out.
Sloppy stuff. Sloppy like all the interview nightmares the HR bloggers are writing about.
Stuff you only get away with only if you have a monopoly.
