Recruitment and screening of Microsoft employees

The average age of Microsoft employees is about 30 years old, and most employees are quite young, especially for applications.ProgramDevelopers in the group. Half of all employees are directly from universities, and many Microsoft managers prefer this approach. They are willing to recruit young people because they are more likely to integrate into the "Microsoft model.

In the early days of the company, Microsoft used the recruitment method of personal interviewers. At that time, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Charles Sianni, and other senior technical staff interviewed each candidate. Microsoft recruited program managers, software developers, test engineers, product managers, customer support engineers, and user trainers in the same way as early employment of developers. Microsoft sends recruiters to about 50 U.S. universities every year. Recruiters go to prestigious universities and pay attention to local schools (especially to recruit customer support engineers and testers) and foreign schools. Recruiters organize visits through the human resources department to handle daily paperwork and participate in interviews with senior technical and product personnel. A promising candidate should go back to the Microsoft headquarters for review. It can be seen that recruiters do not directly hire people, but manage the entire process of recruitment.

In the late 1980s s and early 1990s S, this method accounted for a large proportion. Dave Thompson, the Development Manager of the WindowsNT group, once talked about the role of recruiters and Microsoft's approach to recruiting developers:

There was a special interview on campus where someone went for a pre-selection job. Since then, the recruitment process for experienced and inexperienced personnel is basically the same and has not changed much. The subject will talk to four to six interviewees within one day. Finally, they will talk to the decision makers and the right people will be hired. The interview process is flexible. Recruiters are a key factor in this process and they help manage it. They make this process neither painful nor laborious for development managers. In the past, in small companies, we spent a lot of time hiring people. Now, I only need to spend time answering questions, such as evaluating feedback, interviewing candidates, and making decisions.

When you want to develop faster, you must have an efficient staff interview process. Good recruiters have incredible insights on some important characters ...... They know what kind of people are more likely to become a good Microsoft employee. The results of any company that only relies on the personnel department to recruit personnel are doomed to fail.

All the interviews at Microsoft headquarters are undertaken by people in the functional departments of the product group. Developers are responsible for all the interviews for developers, testers are responsible for all the interviews for testers, and so on. The purpose of an interview conversation is to abstract and determine a person's intelligence level, not just how many codes or tests the candidate knows, or is there any special marketing expertise (gates are often cited as a typical reference when determining four important qualities of a new employee: ambition, IQ, professional technical knowledge, and business judgment, among the four qualities, smart commerce is the most important .) A well-known general question During Microsoft's interview was: estimate the flow of the river in the Mississippi river or the number of gas stations in the United States. The answers to the subject are usually not important, but their methods of analyzing the questions are very important.

Fewer people can filter data. When recruiting developers at a university, Microsoft usually only chooses 10% to 15% of them to go to the Headquarters for review, and finally only employs 10% to 15% of the review personnel. In general, Microsoft only employs 2%-3% of the interviewers. Rick rochard, vice president of Microsoft's research department, said in praise of the screening process: "This is like a verbal test. The interview process was quite strict. I could not ensure that all the excellent talents were screened out. However, all the talents that were screened out must be excellent. They have certain talents and talents, as well as the ability to think independently about problems."

Once hired, new employees will face a series of challenges and challenges. These tests may come from gates at the annual welcome meeting, or it may even come from a cave-like corridor of Microsoft (each of the company's buildings has an X-wing and various edges, increasing the number of windows in each office, only smart people can successfully find their own channels in the aisle .) And only those who are willing to work for a long time can stick to it. Microsoft employees are similar to Japanese employees who take short vacations even if they are on vacation. Dave Moore described a typical day at Microsoft. He said: "This is the case at Microsoft. I woke up in the morning and went to work and work. I felt hungry and went on to have breakfast, continue to work, feel hungry, have lunch, work until tired, and then drive home to bed."

to further test employees' determination, Microsoft pays them relatively low salaries. Gates usually do not pay high salaries to employees and, at the beginning, even refuse to pay overtime for secretaries and other employees. He is actually setting up a policy not to pay overtime. However, in February 1982, he began to issue annual bonuses and assign shares to employees. In 1990s, the amount of such compensation was considerable, as Microsoft's stock prices continued to rise. Compensation to employees now includes up to 15% of the two-year bonus, the stock right to be subscribed, and the discount you enjoy when you buy a stock at your salary. (An employee who has been working at Microsoft for 18 months can earn 25% of the shares. In the next six months, 12.5% of them can be obtained, and all the subscription rights can be fulfilled at any time within 10 years. A New subscription is also issued every two years. Employees can also purchase company shares at a discount price with a salary of no more than l0 %.