Spring is a time of renewal, a time to make household repairs, plant a garden, or lose the spare tire that mysteriously appeared sometime between Halloween and New Year’s Day. Dusting off the cobwebs from a long, dark, cold winter also applies to your career.   Be it a refocus, a restart, or a change in direction these tips should help you get started and set the course for a great year.   Resume Refresh Find your resume: This...
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You prepared for the interviews, felt the interviews went well, and all signs pointed to yes…and yet in the end they decided to go in a different direction.  Now what? After you brush off the upset/mad/confused feelings and start some introspection, realize that this might be one point in your life where you’re more open to a little self -improvement/growth. How do you regroup and make this a net positive experience?   1) Ask...
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Cyril Bounanna is a Senior Development Lead for the Bing Data Quality and Measurement Team.  Today he presents to us a real-life scenario that software engineers and testers encounter when they are building Bing. *** Software engineers have developed a lot of expertise and solutions to assess code quality. From static analysis to E2E automation, performance benchmarks, or search relevance, we know how to verify if our code does the right...
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I think that everyone would agree with the statement that we live in a world that is ever changing and always evolving. The standard way of doing things in the past are being replaced with the better, faster, more efficient versions and this can been seen in almost everything we do. Making a career change is no exception. Gone are the days of reading the ‘Want Ads’ in the newspaper, or dropping off your resume to that potential...
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Working as a Staffing Consultant within Online Services Division here at Microsoft, I am constantly reminded that my job has a lot of similar aspects to sports and trying to put together a team that is set up to win. While watching the NBA Eastern Conference Finals this past weekend, I noticed the intricacies of what it took to put a winning team on the court. Even before teams come together, there is a lot of behind the scenes work that...
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  Hello job seekers! I hope you are off to a great start into the new decade. Now that 2011 has made its grand entrance and we are in a new year, have you thought about a new job? Here is an easy tip to help you prepare for your next interview! Keep a “kudos” or “You Rock” folder on your computer. Yes, I’m serious! Every time your efforts result in something that gets special recognition from your manager or...
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Microsoft and Online Services Division (OSD), the people who brought you Bing, Bing Mobile, MSN, and more, are attending the NBMBAA annual conference in Los Angeles, CA. We will be there meeting and greeting the best and brightest NBMBAA has to offer. We will have hiring managers present to discuss real time openings and how it is to work for a great company like Microsoft. Some of the skills we are looking for are Product Management, Product...
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Testing at Bing provides many fun challenges in an agile environment that ships quickly and frequently.    Testing distributed systems like Autopilot that control thousands of machines requires deep engineering knowledge and understanding of algorithms like PAXOS.   Testing takes a whole new direction with verifying the output from the 3 new tech majors (Data Mining, Business Intelligence, Analytics/Statistics).  ...
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The title “Product Manager” means a lot of things at a lot of different companies.  What does a Product Manager on the Bing team do?  Put simply, product management in Bing is about global business leadership.  We are responsible for identifying customer insights that inform R&D investments; guiding the division by developing near and long-term business plans; enabling the field to successfully launch and sell our...
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My last blog post was about resume tips for developers.  Since I am a technical recruiter, I spend a lot of my time talking with candidates, hiring managers and reviewing resumes.  As a recruiter at Microsoft, you juggle the precarious task of candidate experience, hiring manager experience, diversity and inclusion and striving to find the right talent.  We are serious about all areas.  So what better way to enhance the...
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