What the heck is Google thinking?

Since mid-2006, Google has had to deal with an increasing amount of bad press critical of their recruiting and hiring process: How the process could take 4-6 months and was so involved that more and more A-list candidates ended up accepting offers from other companies.

Google made noises about fixing the problems, but the truth was that their employment brand was so strong - the cool offices, free snacks, the bringing of pets to the office, etc. - that it really didn't matter. They always had plenty of top talent applying.

But it's the classic story: When you've been a media- and business-world darling for so long, and many of your employees are pre-IPO millionaires, you tend to get cocky.

Today, the New York Times ran a revealing front-page story: Google has just raised the price of their in-house daycare by 75%, which means that an employee with 2 kids in daycare now pays $57,000. The resulting brouhaha reveals that Google, once the model of a fun, friendly, perq-filled work environment, is fast becoming just another company.

The problem is that when so much of your phenomenal success is based on your employment brand - we've all seen profiles of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, riding their Segways around the office, or relaxing in beanbag chairs in the super-funky meeting areas - you really can't afford to start acting like 'any other company'. An eroding employment brand leads swiftly to an eroding consumer brand.

Even though Google is now so huge as to have virtual monopolies in online tools - like search engines, web-based email, online advertising, to name a few - they have largely avoided the 'Evil Empire' backlash that has plagued other behemoths like Microsoft, mostly because of their 'kinder, gentler' employment brand.

But that's changing, too. Google's control of such huge amounts of data, and the secrecy surrounding its search algorithms, have always attracted a certain amount of criticism - no one likes to think that one organization is in a position to take a 'Big Brother' role.

Until recently, the average person dismissed these fears: it was hard to believe that a company which let you bring your dog to work would ever actually use all that information for nefarious purposes. As Google reveals itself to be 'just another company', however, the chorus of criticism is getting louder, more pervasive, and less confined to computer-geeks-on-the-fringe.

The bottom line? If Google doesn't address its employment brand issues soon, they're going to find that some new company is going to do to them what they did to Microsoft a few years ago: provide a hip, friendly alternative to the Evil Hegemony.

(The decline may already have begun: Between November 2007 and April 2008, Google's share price had dropped by 44%. It's recovered somewhat, but is still down by 28% since November.)