I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Hyderabad) in Sep 2019
Interview
Do not join CSEO
- 1 hour telephonic + 3 F2F rounds on campus (2 by product management and 1 by engineering management). Ideally, this is followed by an F2F round with the Hiring Manager
- The role was for their internal product (CSEO, known as MS IT earlier) for which MS is recruiting at this moment @ Hyderabad
- All PM interviewers asked same questions - on product vision, goals, product, technology, process, my contribution, roadmap and data
- Unlike regular PM interviews, no questions were asked on product design
- While the telephonic interview and 1st round went smoothly, the 2nd F2F panel did not seem convinced with my responses (although I gave exactly same responses in the first 2 rounds). At one point, it felt as if the 2nd panel was humiliating me and the product that I was working on
- On campus, I was told by the recruiter that I cleared the 2nd interview and each round was an elimination round. So, I waited 3 hours for the next interviewer (EM round)
- After EM round, I was told by HR that they ll get back to me later as the hiring manager was not around
- Next week, I was told that I didn't qualify the 2nd F2F interview round and they will get back once they have a consolidated feedback
- Till now, HR has not bothered to get back or update status on Microsoft Portal. She kept saying that she doesn't have feedback of all interviewers. After few days, she was unresponsive.
If you really respect a candidate's time, you would have the courtesy to atleast tell them about rejection. All it takes is an email or a phone call, which should be automated by the very team that was interviewing me!
Heard that other teams within Microsoft are much efficient wrt Recruitment but I cannot comment on it.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Aug 2019
Interview
I applied online and a couple weeks later was contacted to go directly to an on-site interview. I thought this was strange for MSFT so I requested a phone call to learn more about the position, they obliged and I was able to have a conversation with the team manager before coming in for the interview. I was scheduled for a half day of interviews (again, kind of strange for MSFT) but then due to the manager's travel schedule, the interviews were split up over 2 days (extremely inconvenient). I had 3 conversations: 1 was with a teammate and was behavioral, 1 was with a related manager and was technical (product knowledge and general technical knowledge), and the last was with the aforementioned manager, who barely asked me anything. The technical interview was way more in depth than I was expecting!
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Hyderabad) in Jan 2015
Interview
Very objective interviewing process. Almost all questions are related to the role. What I liked specifically was managers cannot interview candidates till they have undergone a comprehensive training on interviewing.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How did I configure SharePoint 2013 for certain specific requirements.