Hangout on Air: Dutch Sales roles in Dublin

TOLU THOMAS: Hi, everyone.
Welcome to another Hangout out on air.
This time we're talking with the Dutch team in Dublin.
My name's Tolu Thomas.
I work in our Mountain View staffing team.
And with me today is a whole set of people
from the Dublin office.
So I'll let everyone introduce themselves.
Michelle, do you want to start?
MICHELLE KINSLEY: Cool.
Hi everybody, my name's Michelle Kinsley.
I am a recruitment specialist on the Dublin staffing team
here in our European headquarters.
I've been with Google for two and a half years.
I absolutely love it here.
I suppose my favorite part of my role is guiding candidates
through the recruitment process and making that phone
call to them when I have a full-time offer for them.
I remember the phone call that I received.
And every time my phone rang over those few days when I was
waiting, I just was like, I hope this is Google calling.
So it's a really nice feeling to be offering candidates a
full-time role to join us here in Google.
TOLU THOMAS: Great, Jean-Christophe?
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE MIGNON: Hello.
Good afternoon.
My name is Jean-Christophe.
I'm working in the business acquisition team for Belgium.
I started at Google earlier this year in January, which is
now about nine months, more or less.
And basically I finished school one year and a half
ago, so these are my first steps in the professional
world, and the corporate world.
And I have to say, it's really nice.
I think Google is probably one of the best
environments to work for.
And basically it's a lot of fun, a lot of working, but
really good.
TOLU THOMAS: Great.
Peter?
PETER: Hi, I'm Peter.
I work in the SMB sales team.
And I've been working here for about a year now--
and also, like Jean-Christophe,
straight from college.
It's a great [INAUDIBLE]
here in Dublin.
A lot of young people, and [INAUDIBLE]
hours compared to my year on the [INAUDIBLE].
That is actually the feeling you get here in the office.

TOLU THOMAS: OK, Merel.
MEREL STALENHOEF: Alright, so, I'm Merel.
I work for the SMB services team, so
that's customer support.
I've been working at Google for four years now.
What I love about my job is just helping customers really
getting to understand their AdWords account and how they
can make a difference online by putting their business
online with great AdWords accounts.
And I like the diversity of my job-- so helping them by chat,
phone, email.
And really for SMBs, it's so important that they have a
good running AdWords account online and you can really help
them make that difference.
TOLU THOMAS: Great.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Hi, my name is Karline.
I've been working for Google now since January, so like
nine months.
Before, I was working for the Dutch Postal Company.
I was working there for four years.
So it's my second job, or second company.
And I really like it.
It's a really nice atmosphere with a lot of creative and
ambitious people.
So we will hear about it later.
TOLU THOMAS: Great, great.
So we have a diversity of people from
different teams here.
So we've talked about a couple different acronyms that we use
within the sales team.
Peter, do you want to give us an overview of what the
different sales teams in Dublin are, and what each of
these crazy acronyms means?
PETER: Yeah, absolutely, sure.
So I'll start with the team that Jean-Christophe is
working in--
the ISO team.
What they actually do, as he had mentioned himself, is the
business acquisition.
So they actually want to help companies that have not yet
advertised with Google to start advertising with us and
to help them choose the right solutions we offer.
Karline's working in LCS, and they actually work with the
large customers we have at Google.
And that's more account managing [INAUDIBLE].
Merel works in services team, as she says,
as more of a reactive--
SMDs, they actually need support, in--
MEREL STALENHOEF: When they call in with all sorts of
questions about their AdWords account, and they would like
to have advice on how they can improve their performance in
AdWords, we help them with it--
troubleshoot their questions, and give them advice on how to
improve their performance.
PETER: Yep, exactly.
She explained it better than I could do.
Myself, I work in the sales team SMD.
So we actually help the small SMDs proactively with
optimizing their accounts.
TOLU THOMAS: Great, great.
And Karline do you want to talk about just kind of how
the language teams are structured?
So you guys all work on the Dutch teams, but do you want
to talk a little bit more about the Dublin office and
how we're organized in terms of language?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Yeah, of course.
Yeah, as you say, we are working for the Dutch team--
it is combined Belgium/Dutch team.
But we also have a team from every country,
all based in Belgium.
So that means that we have--
I just heard the number, [INAUDIBLE]
68 different languages here in the Dublin office.
So you can imagine that it's quite lively here.
And we work together on different fields.
So you can imagine that we have clients that are active
in different countries, so we work together to get the best
out of them--
[INAUDIBLE] for them.
So I will ask my German colleagues to help me with
some German complaints or German marketing activities.
But, of course, we have a lot of social activities for that
as well, because we are all based here in Dublin.
And as you can imagine, we are here with so many people that
are new in this city.
So yeah, there are a lot of nights with activities
organized or that people organized themselves.
Now you've probably heard that Google is, yeah, a quite
special office.
And I also get the question if we have the slides here.
But we don't have slides here.
But we have a lot of other fun stuff.
And the offices are really well decorated, the
furniture--
it's really cool to have to work in this environment.
And especially that we are working here with so many
young people and all are really ambitious.
So a lot of things are going on.
TOLU THOMAS: Great, great.
And how much interaction do you have with some of the
other European offices?
So, on the Dutch team do you guys work with folks from the
Amsterdam office?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, especially for the large clients, we
have a combined team.
So half of my team is based in Amsterdam and half my team is
based here.
And I work together with them a lot.
They often have more time to go to clients.
And so I do a lot of preparation here, but I am
going to clients myself as well.
Of course, not as often as they are able to go.
But we definitely work together, and we actually
share targets as well, so-- we have to-- and it's really
nice, as well.
We also work together with people from other offices.
But that's more to [INAUDIBLE] in London there are a lot of
product specialists based, so they have a lot
of input from them.
It depends on where the people are based who are working on
specific products or [INAUDIBLE]
or whatever.
TOLU THOMAS: OK, great.
And so, Jean-Christophe, do you want to talk about kind of
the career mobility--
I know a lot of you guys are in your first year at Google.
So what do career prospects look like on the
sales team in Dublin?
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE MIGNON: OK, sure, no problem.
Well, as I'm only for nine months at Google, yet.
I'm still in my first job, I haven't done a rotation yet.
But to give you an idea, well, basically there are two people
at the Dublin office that are full time busy
with internal mobility.
This means that it's really possible to change different
teams inside of Google, which gives you the opportunity,
basically, to learn much more about different teams.
Like, do you want to do account management?
Do you want to do business acquisition?
Are you more interested in going from AdWords to AdSense?
There are a lot of different possibilities and positions,
and it's very easy to change positions inside of Google
This gives a lot of
opportunities to develop yourself.
And at Google it's very much
appreciated to develop yourself.
Like, your manager will actually ask you to come up
with a program--
where do you see yourself in two years?
What will you be doing?
So you're actually obliged to think about your personal
development.
So that's pretty cool.
TOLU THOMAS: Yeah, it sounds great.
OK, So, Michelle, do you want to talk a little bit about
what we're looking for on these teams as we're growing?
So, what's the application process like?
What's the interview process like for someone who's
interested in joining a sales team in Dublin?
MICHELLE KINSLEY: Excellent.
Sure.
So I think we have roles for these Dutch markets open on
pretty much everything team that we've got
representatives here for.
And there are requirements that are a little bit similar
but also that differentiate from each other, for each
individual role.
So I'll start with SMB, which is the small to medium
businesses--
or businesses team.
We have a sales team.
So what they're looking for, what recruiters and myself are
looking for, are people who have six months to two years--
two and half years experience selling over the phone,
predominantly, and who have a real passion for sales.
People that want to work to a commission structure, because
we work here at Google in the sales business under a
target-driven environment.
So we're looking for people that want to get into sales
that have experience in dealing with
clients over the phone.
You're talking small to medium businesses that will be based,
obviously, in the Netherlands.
Then the second team we have is SMB services.
This team is more reactive.
So they're taking incoming calls about
queries on AdWord accounts.
So for here we're not looking for as sales orientated
people, but definitely people who have customer experience
over the phone, again, preferably.
And then moving on to the large customer sales team,
which are the account managers that manage the portfolio of
very large clients.
We're looking for people with two plus years experience.
So typically two to five years experience in dealing with
CEOs and very senior people in large companies.
And then finally, for the inside sales team.
These are you're real hunters versus your farmers.
So you're talking about generating new business.
Again they're dealing with small to medium businesses,
but they are actually making outbound
calls to these clients.
And these clients are not dealing
with Google, presently.
So they're not existing clients.
It's all about generating new revenue with these clients,
and getting them on board to show them the product suite
that Google can offer.
TOLU THOMAS: Great.
And so what advice would you give to someone who's thinking
of applying?
We get a lot of questions in terms of, what
should I put in my resume?
Should I write a cover letter?
What advice would you give to potential applicants?
MICHELLE KINSLEY: Absolutely.
So the way Google looks at it, the CV that comes into the
recruiter, or comes in to Google in general, is your
official document that represents you.
So be 100% truthful.
Definitely the layout and the format is not the be-all and
end-all, but it is something that we look at.
If you can imagine, we scan a lot of CVs every single day.
So something that's easy on the eye and that's easy to
follow, really makes the recruiters life that little
bit easier.
And definitely really highlight your over
achievements.
We are looking for ambitious, very talented individuals to
join Google.
So really highlight your achievements and what you've
exceeded in doing.
And that's across your academics, your experience--
also highlight the things that you're interested in in terms
of extracurricular activities.
Google wants to know what else you're interested in, outside
of work and university, for example.
What are you passionate about?
And particularly, look at the job spec that
you're applying for.
And if the job spec has certain requirements and
you've got experience in those requirements, try and
highlight that in the CV.
So in general, it's just a well laid out CV that's
appealing on the eye, but also really shows us what this
candidate can offer Google.
TOLU THOMAS: Right, OK.
Great.
So we've gathered a number of questions from our moderator
page from our users over the last few days.
So I thought we could dive right into
some of those questions.
So, first one comes from Matt's, and he asks, "What is
Google's stance on work/life balance across the board of
the company?" Jean-Christophe, do you want to take that one?
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE MIGNON: Yeah, sure.
If we're looking at work/life balance, I have worked in a
different company before I joined Google, and I can
definitely say--
also if I compare with fellow students from last year--
that my work/life balance is pretty OK.
This means that basically it's perfectly OK, even your
manager will tell you to leave at 6:00.
Nobody is expecting you to work until 8:00, until 9:00 to
achieve targets that are totally impossible to achieve.
No, people will actually ask you here to go to the gym, do
some sports, find an extra-curricular activity.
For example, I'm playing sometimes with Peter, who is
also in the Hangout, we're going to play squash.
Or I go to golf.
I also, each Tuesday, I'm having a Spanish course.
So basically, anything that you want to do with Google,
there is a group.
There is somebody that has the same interest as you.
And that means, of course, that if you want to do those
activities, you can do it after work,
during work, whatever.
But basically there is possibility to do that.
So it's not only work, it's also life.
And that's mainly the most important, I think, if you
want to be happy and if you want to perform well in your
job, as well.
TOLU THOMAS: Yeah, I totally agree with that.
I mean especially at one of the bigger offices like
Dublin, there's so many other people who have shared
interests, and there are mailing lists, and there's a
lot of different activities that you can do.
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE MIGNON: Exactly, yeah.
Just to give you an idea, well, I started here in a
rather small team, in the Benelux team, playing golf.
OK, in Belgium golf is not that popular.
Well, in Ireland it is.
So we started with like one person, two people, three
people to play on each Saturday or Sunday.
And basically now we have too many people every weekend to
go out and play with.
So they are rather unhappy about that.
TOLU THOMAS: Great.
OK, so our next question comes from Rick, and he asks, "To
what extent does Google allow their employees to use their
own vision within projects?" Karline, do you want to talk
about that one?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Yeah, of course.
Yeah, what I've seen so far is that your own input is really
appreciated.
So all the projects that you are doing you can
use your own approach.
But it's more about, in the end, you have to reach the
results that are expected from you.
So how you do that, or who you want to be involved in that,
that's really up to you.
What I've seen as well, that besides your own work, there
is a lot of encouragement about bringing in your own
ideas to improve processes, to improve tools, or to improve
things that we are doing now, but also more bigger ideas are
really welcome.
And you have to find the right people, of course, but that's
in every company, to encourage your ideas and to bring it on.
It's all about proactiveness--
and try it.
And no one will say that you're not allowed to bring a
great new idea or a great new approach.
So it's really up to you.
TOLU THOMAS: Yeah, that's great.
OK, so our next question comes from Daphne, she asks, "What
does a sales job with Google actually entail?
What sort of task will be done and what skills are required?"
So we talked about this briefly, but Peter do you want
to give a little bit more detail about what sales at
Google really means?
PETER: Yeah, sure.
I think it kind of depends on what team you're actually
working on, and what skills are needed, and what they kind
of expect of you.

For my team where I'm working, for example--
SMB sales, what they expect from us is
really to be fast paced.
We have a large portfolio of different clients.
So, in the morning you might be talking with a plumber, in
the afternoon you might be talking with a lawyer, and in
the evening you might talk to someone that sells flag poles
online-- and that's an actual day that happened to me.
And you have to be able to envision different business
models and think really with the client to give them the
best possible solution.
I think flexibility is definitely one aspect that we
look for in people.
And one thing I think across all sales teams, well actually
our motto, is doing what is best for the customer.
So I think we would never pitch or try to sell a
solution to a customer that actually would not benefit it.
So we really try to have a great relationship with our
customers--
big, small, medium.
We really try to create a long-term relationship for
them with Google.
And that only works if you're empathic to them, if you
really live up to their standards, actually.
Well, I think that in a nutshell, is a
sales job at Google.
TOLU THOMAS: OK, great.
OK, so we have time for one more question.
It comes from Rob, and he asks a very basic one, "I'm very
curious about what Google is looking for in people?" So,
Michelle, you talked a little bit about the skills required,
but do you want to talk about, from a personal standpoint,
what kind of people are we looking for to join the team?
MICHELLE KINSLEY: Absolutely.
So again, I suppose that depends in general in fitting
in with the team that the people are applying for.
But in general, the people at Google are very innovative.
They're curious about things.
They want to know why things are done a certain way.
They're ambitious.
They also are kind of curious about other people.
A lot of Googlers have traveled quite a bit.
They have varied interests.
Their job is not their soul reason for
living, so to speak.
They have interests outside of work and university.
Whether that be politics, music, charity work, there's
all sorts of interests that Googlers have here.
So in general, someone that has a good passion for life,
wants to learn a lot, who wants to achieve a lot in
their career, they're ambitious, outgoing, that's
pretty much it.
I mean, as I said, we have lots of different people here.
But that would be a very generic summary.
TOLU THOMAS: OK, great.
All right, well, we're just about out of time.
And I want to thank all of you for
participating in the Hangout.
And thank you guys for watching.
We're always doing Hangouts on the Life at Google page, so
please follow the Life at Google page on Google+.
And if you're interested in any of these sales roles that
we've talked about, in our Dublin office, or across
Europe, or anywhere really.
Just visit our job site.
So that's www.google.com/jobs.
And you can search there.
You can search by location, you can search for Dutch
roles, search for Dublin, and there's a ton of great
resources on the job site.
All right, thanks everyone.
It's great talking to you.