Everybody makes mistakes, but it’s surprising to see large companies like Google commit these goofs, and it’s even more unexpected when foul-ups in the recruiting-and-hiring process.  These things do happen, though, as Jeff Barr, who turned down a job with Google, recently found out.

Google is often viewed as the best employer one could hope to get; just yesterday, I wrote an article applauding the company’s pet policy.  But Barr, who now works for Amazon as the Senior Manager of Web Services Evangelism, didn’t really need a new job, and he also didn’t need a hassle related to his grades.

“They were almost ready to make the ‘can’t refuse’ offer but the process became bogged down when I couldn’t recall my college GPA,” states Barr.  “Given that I earned my degree in 1985 and have been earning a living by writing code since I was 15 or 16, this didn’t seem all that essential.”  So Barr quit the negotiations, and the exchange, which took place last year, ended.

“Funny thing is, I now have several more emails in my inbox from other Google recruiters,” he wrote last night.  “After reading these emails it appears that they don’t know that I interviewed there last year!  Perhaps they don’t have this data in searchable form.  Could that be?”

That’s funny.  So are the extremely comprehensive preparations that Google expects of interviewees (Barr is “supposed to study the technical, competitive, and business aspects of their searching, mapping, blog searching, blogging, calendaring, document storage, finance, groups, social networking, and feed reading products”).

So not even Google, that best of the best places to work, is perfect, and now people like Robert Scoble and Rowan Manahan are taking note.  Perhaps, as Manahan suggests, “[I]f you have doubled the size of your workforce three years running, it is inevitable that some cracks will start to show.”