To clarify Gayle's response, not all candidates are presented to Google's Hiring Committee following their onsites. If by reviewing interviewer scores and feedback a case is an obvious "no", a Recruiter and/or Hiring Manager will typically make the call to reject a candidate on their own.

Candidates are presented to Hiring Committee for review if their feedback (interview, reference, etc) is *generally* positive, so unfortunately, simply being presented to HC doesn't mean that you had "excellent interview feedback". At Engineering Hiring Committees, typically only ~3 of every 8 candidates reviewed receive a recommendation for hire.

However, that you made it to HC review at all is actually a good sign -- and suggests that it would be worthwhile for you to reapply again in the future. Keep in mind that Google's hiring process is strongly biased towards avoiding making bad hires -- and invariably some potentially good hires get caught in that filter not because they are bad candidates, but simply because there wasn't strong/clear enough positive evidence to move them forward with.

Google typically suggests that you wait ~18 months before reapplying to the same/similar role (so that you have time to gain additional skills and experience), but is often willing to bring people back after only 12 months.

Your referrer's feedback would have already been considered as advocacy on your behalf, so there may not be much else they can do for you. However, if the original referral feedback they provided on you was"sparse" on details (which quite often referring employees' comments are), providing more detail and elaboration *might* make a difference. They should ask your Recruiter if your case was close enough that it would be worth revisiting with expanded feedback from them. However, access to individuals' information inside Google (not only user data, but also candidate information) is highly compartmentalized -- so it would actually be against internal privacy policy and controls for the Recruiter to share any information about your other internal references with your referrer.

Lastly, re Piaw's "blackball" comment. It's been quite some time since Piaw worked at Google, and the company's recruiting practices have changed and evolved significantly since he left.

A) for all Tech/Eng roles (but less consistently across other functions), internal referencing is actually now performed at the beginning of the process (typically even before phone screens), so if there was some really egregious internal feedback on you, you likely wouldn't have even made it to the onsite interview phase.

B) However, more importantly, Google doesn't actually treat negative internal references as "black balls". I've seen candidates who have received "absolutely do not hire this person" internal references from very senior/respected Googlers (even from a VP), but who ended up receiving an offer because there was other positive data (most typically internal references from other Googlers) that had Google's SVPs decide a candidate was worth taking a risk on anyway.