I applied through college or university. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Nov 2016
Interview
Applied at school career fair and had a 30 minute on-campus interview. I was invited for final rounds in Redmond. I interviewed with a Bing team for a big data/ ML role. Overall the experience was quite good. I had 4 interviews total. 3 were very nice and engaging the whole time. The last interviewer was awful and did not pay attention to me at all. He gave a very difficult interview question and then spent the whole time on this laptop.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
System design question about handling jobs using multiple processors. Wrote some code based on my design
Given a dictionary and one string, create a valid sentence from the string by adding spaces in appropriate places. Difficult because you had to know to back track recursively
It was a nice experience, I was asked about my CV, hobbies, projects (how I collaborated with my colleagues) and I had an algorithmic problem, some OOP and system design.
Initial Screening: This might involve a phone call or an initial video interview with a recruiter or HR representative. The purpose of this stage is to briefly discuss your background, skills, and interest in the position, and to determine if you meet the basic qualifications for the role.
Technical Assessment: Depending on the role, you may be asked to complete a technical assessment or coding challenge. This could be done remotely or on-site and is designed to evaluate your technical skills and problem-solving abilities. For software engineering roles, this might involve writing code to solve algorithmic problems or completing a coding project.
Video interviews. Met multiple interesting people in the team. Asked about experience and background. Good process overall. Would have liked to have joined the company but it didn't work out.
Software Engineering applicants have rated the interview process at Microsoft with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 67% positive. To compare, the company-average is 66.4% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineering roles take an average of 33 days to get hired, when considering 54 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Microsoft overall takes an average of 30 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Microsoft as a Software Engineering according to 54 Glassdoor interviews include:
One on one interview: 36%
Skills test: 19%
Phone interview: 17%
Personality test: 8%
Presentation: 7%
Drug test: 4%
Background check: 3%
Group panel interview: 2%
Other: 2%
IQ intelligence test: 2%
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