I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Sep 2016
Interview
Initially connected with a recruiter from Microsoft at a career fair. Talked a bit about my resume. They emailed me and setup an on campus interview for later that week. The interview was roughly 30 minutes. We talked a little bit about prior experience, did a technical question, and then there was a few minutes left for questions.
The second round of interviews was a half day on campus. I did 4 rounds of interviews, each 45 minutes long. Final interview was with a manager. The interviews were all about the same in structure and the questions depended on who you were interviewing with. Overall I didn't find the questions to be too challenging and fairly straight forward.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were very standard for a software engineering technical interview. None of them were too tricky. I was asked to give runtimes and talk about other approaches to the problem.
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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