Google’s Head of Communications, Elliot Schrage, is heading for social networking darling Facebook.

Schrage is the latest in a series of high profile Google staffers to leave for Facebook recently: Sheryl Sandberg, the former VP of Global Sales for Google is also now Facebook’s CEO; Ethan Beard was the Director of Social Media at Google and is now Facebook’s Business Development Director; One of Google’s top engineers, Ben Ling, is now running Facebook’s Platform Product Marketing; Gideon Yu was the CFO for Google’s YouTube business unit, and has also moved to Facebook as their CFO;

Google is famed for the standards of staff meals at their headquarters, known as the Googleplex. To add insult-to-injury, Facebook even managed to hire one of Google’s top chefs - Josef Desimone.

Other prominent Googlers to leave for positions elsewhere include Salman Ullah, who was Google’s Director of Corporate Development who left to found venture firm Copper River Partners; Dominic Preuss, who ran Google’s local ad initiative left for Meetup, a social networking event manager for startups; Gokul Rajaram, the “Godfather of AdSense” - Google’s cashcow - has left to pursue his own projects; Nathan Stoll, Product Manager for Google News was a recent departure; Kevin Fox, a leading user experience expert at Google left within a matter of days of Stoll; and Chris Sacca, Director of Google’s Special Initiatives has also left for a venture capitalist.

At one time Google was seen as ‘the’ company to work for. Started with lofty aims to ‘do no evil’ now thrown into the wind as they turn into another technology behemoth. Facebook is still trying to find its place in the market and monetise their user base, the influx of experienced and talented staff used to working together can only work to Facebook’s advantage.