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August 11, 2004

Interviewing

I've had a huge number of people ask me about the Microsoft Interview (tm), so I thought I'd devote a post to discussing what THAT's all about.

Microsoft, like a lot of big companies, does on-campus MBA recruiting (for instance, I also did on-campus interviews with RealNetworks and Amazon). At the UW, that means they contact our career services center and pick an arrival date; Microsoft then posts the kinds of positions they're interviewing for and begins soliciting resumes (electronically, natch).

The Microsoft recruiter pores through the resumes and issues interview invitations to those students she (in my case, anyway) wants to chat with. As I understand it, Microsoft got something like 40 or 50 resumes from our class, and issued invitations to 9 of us.

The interviews are held at the campus career center. They're formal (wear a suit), and last about an hour. The first part of the interview is casual chat; the second part is more in-depth case questions and hypothetical stuff. This structure is designed to give the interviewer a good sense of who you are and how you think. Basically, they want to know if you're someone that they feel comfortable bringing back to campus.

If you don't have a lot of experience with case interviewing in general, be sure to check out a fantastic book on the subject, "How Would You Move Mount Fuji?" While it's specifically about Microsoft, I found that the material was pretty applicable to all the interviews I did.

After the interviews are over, The Great Waiting begins. Microsoft didn't give us a sense of when we should expect to hear from them, so you just kind of hang out and hope for good news. All nine of us compared notes pretty regularly ("You hear anything? Me either!"), and eventually notification arrived late on a Monday. Two emotions were stirred.

First, it felt really special to go to round two. Of the nine of us that interviewed on campus, two were asked to round two - myself and Dave Bodmer. I should point out that I know the other seven folks, and they're all top-flight people. It could have been any of us.

Second, it was terrifying to hear that the interview was scheduled for that Friday, leaving just 96 hours to prepare.

The second round interview is the big one- Microsoft calls them "Super Fridays." Basically, MBAs from all over the country are flown in to Redmond for a long day of serial interviews. Dave and I both had the same start time (9 AM), so we carpooled (funny story: we played John Williams' "Imperial March" and Madonna's "Ray of Light" to psych ourselves up). When we arrived, we ran in to other students from Chicago, Berkeley, and Harvard. We had about ten minutes to chat with these folks and then the recruiters came to get us. Everyone was taken to their own office, where we spent the rest of the day.

Super Friday works like "Survivor." You stay in your office all day long ('cept for soda and bathroom breaks), and different Microsoft employees come along and interview. Interviews last about 45 minutes each, and can be about any damn thing the interviewer wants to talk about. Once the session is done, the interviewer thanks you for your time, gets up, and leaves. At that point, the interviewer has to make a judgment about you - thumbs-up or thumbs-down - to the rest of their team. If you get a thumbs-up, the next person comes along for the interview. If you get a thumbs-down, you go home.

The longer you stay, the better you're doing.

This can create some surreal moments. I remember emerging from my first after-lunch interview (I was beat) and suddenly realizing that a good number of the other offices near me were empty. Before I went in for the interview, these all held other MBAs.

It's kind of like a slasher film - the killer picks us off, one by one...

The interviews themselves are pretty intense. Each person is looking for something specific, and they're going to drill and drill until you give it to them. Some people are looking for raw smarts. Others want to know how you approach problems. Still others are interested in how you present your life narrative, or how you choose to tell stories. It just depends. One thing that struck me is that the interview questions tended to stay off of the purely hypothetical ("How many golf balls will fit in a 747?") and instead revolve around projects that the interviewer is actually experiencing. In fact, I got asked questions about the project that I am now working on. Go figure.

One of the great thing about Microsoft interviews is that they're a two-way street. The people I spoke with were interested in having a conversation, and it afforded me an opportunity to get the 411 about life in the company.

This two-way-streetness also helped me get into my current role. When I signed up for the interviews, I selected Product Management and Product Planning as areas of interest. At the time, I had no idea what planning entailed - every tech company has a Product Manager, but planners?

When I finally started meeting the planners during the interview loop, it became very, very clear very, very fast that planning was something I'd groove on.

The end of the day finally comes, and your brain has the consistency of tapioca. Be sure to pick out a favorite watering hole BEFORE you head off that morning, because your mental faculties will be, shall we say, impaired, by the end of the day. Beer is also a perfect conduit to explain to your friends what you've just gone through, and to obsess frantically about your performance. =)

So the punch line is that a week later, they made me an offer. For Product Planning. Which was killer.

(Oh, and while Dave's Microsoft interviews didn't go as well as he'd hoped, he still scored some T-Mobile hotness for the summer. He's happy.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer at August 11, 2004 1:18 PM. Posted to MSFT.

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