I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in Oct 2012
Interview
Campus interview.
Had a 30 minute interview on campus interview. Was asked some basic questions about what are my interests, what challenges I faced on my academic projects and all that stuff.
Then I was asked a technical question .... write a algorithm to print a nXn matrix in spiral form.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
write a algorithm to print a nXn matrix in spiral form.
I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Kyiv, ) in Nov 2012
Interview
When I applied to them, it turned out they were planning to have a campus recruiting event in my city (Moscow) within next 2 weeks, though unfortunately I was on a trip at that time so couldn't make it. Thus they made one phone interview (with a recruiter) and invited me to a recruiting event in Kiev six weeks later.
There they had two groups of interviewees coming at different times, each group consisting of 6 people. Every person would undergo 3 or 4 interviews (each 45-minutes long). After every interview interviewers exchange some feedback and you listen to the HR guy who promotes Seattle as a place to live. After that you go to another interview. After 3 interviews they analyse the feedback and decide who stays for another interview. If you aren't invited to the fourth interview, that doesn't mean you wouldn't get an offer. I personally got an offer after only 3.
The questions vary in difficulty depending on your interviewer, but overall I found them harder than in other major companies (Google, Facebook). As usually, if you have ever participated in programming competitions, you have better chances of solving their problems.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I don't think I can disclose the exact question, but one of the interviewers actually asked two questions, one of then being some kind of "real world" open-ended one, and another one seemed to be algorithmic, the problem was that there was no solution, and even the interviewer had some ideas about it but not the complete solution.