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...
Read More

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...
Read More

  One of the perks of being a recruiter is meeting lots of new people, lots of new conversations and ideas sharing, it’s fantastic! But the ONE thing that consistently comes up in my conversations with potential candidates before their onsite interview is “So what are they really looking for, what does a successful interview mean?” Well, there are many competencies that would make for a successful interview but in my opinion...
Read More

Dear Candidate: When I like your resume enough to pull you out of our database and we’ve arranged a time to talk on the phone, I hope you’ll to be prepared to talk to me.   When I ask you to “tell me about yourself,” I hope you’ll be ready for the question.   There should not be a long, uncomfortable silence from you when I ask this. When you get on the phone during...
Read More

One of our blog readers asked how he can prep for his upcoming Microsoft interview.  There is a ton of information online and I have provided some of those links below, but here are some tips I give my candidates (thanks to some of my fellow recruiters who have helped articulate the tips so well): Brush up on your programming skills, including algorithms and data structures.  Yes, we may ask you about computer science principles from...
Read More

Want an inside secret?    Everyone wants to study for their upcoming interviews, but with all the information out there, what do you choose?   In a meeting today with the executive leadership at Bing, they were discussing all of the online learning options. And one (very-senior-not-to-be-named) executive raved about the machine learning series from Stanford professor Andrew Ng. And it seems that for free, and in a variety of...
Read More