As a journalist at Computerworld Australia:
Microsoft is currently looking to fill 50 positions in Australia, so if you've ever wanted a piece of one of the IT industry's biggest pies, now would be a good time to strike.
Liz Tay speaks with Fiona Hathaway, Recruitment Manager for Microsoft Australia and New Zealand, about the company's arduous recruitment process, and finds out a surprising statistic: one in five candidates interviewed for a position at Microsoft make it into the company.
Who is Microsoft currently looking to hire?
Each one of those 50 roles is different. We've got everything from product managers, to consultants, to presales people, to programmers.
In Australia, there have been 55 positions filled from July this year. We've got pretty aggressive growth targets this year for the business, and so in order to achieve that, we need to bring in particular skills. In particular, our services business, which is where the professional services are and where we implement Microsoft technology into clients, is really growing. So in the technical side, I would see really steady growth in newly created roles for the rest of the financial year.
I would expect by June 30 next year we would have recruited probably about 200 roles. That's what we did last year, and we'll do the same this year.
How does Microsoft go about searching for potential employees?
We do hire some people through head hunters, the rest we source ourselves. This year, to date, the statistic is about 13 percent through an agency and the rest of the hires we do direct.
We have five internal recruiters who do most of the recruitment. When you talk about sourcing candidates directly, obviously there's a variety of different ways you can come across them. We have an employee referral program, where we use the people that work for us to tip us onto the good candidates who are out there in the market. We do a high proportion of internal moves as well, to fill the roles.
We're quite lucky that we've got a strong brand in the market. We advertise on our own Web site, or we do branded ads on some of the job boards - particularly SEEK. We find SEEK gives us a good result. Other than that, we use the employee referral program, and talk to people like you [Computerworld], and try and publicize the role to people out there in the market.
We have a program for hiring graduates, we call it the Microsoft Academy for College hires, and we would take 12 graduates on every year - we did 12 last year, and our target this year is also 12. They can either be undergraduates or MBAs, so we talk to all the MBA schools as well as the major universities.
One of the things that is interesting often to people out there in the market is that we use Australia as a graduate hiring ground internationally. Three times a year, the American staffing team comes over to Australia, and they hire out of Australia to the U.S. They're technical people that they hire, and they're due here again in early January, in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.
Is higher education a requirement of all candidates?
We do value higher education, but it's not exclusively your academic qualifications for us. We have lots of people working for us who don't have a degree. I do a lot of marketing to TAFE, so we're not elitist in looking for particular academic qualifications; the experience is very important to us and so we do recruit through a variety of different channels.
What does Microsoft look for in a candidate, and how much industrial experience would someone with no degree need to be a good candidate?
It would be great if they had three to five years - anything less than that, it's a little bit difficult.
The Professional Competencies Microsoft looks to satisfy in hiring technical professional staff include, analytical problem solving, building customer relationships, project management, strategic insight and technology expertise.
What's the recruitment process like?
We're probably quite renown for quite an exhaustive recruitment process. We would typically interview people four or five times, by different interviewers, before they [candidates] get offered the role with us.
We don't really make an apology for that because it's not so much about the technical skills that you have, because we can gauge them quite easily within the first and second interview. It's more actually about are they a fit for the company, and in particular, are they a values match.
So when we interview, we interview against three criteria. The first thing we interview against is the values, and if we don't feel you're a match to the Microsoft culture, whether you're technically capable of doing the job or not, we would not put you forward into the role.
The second thing is the job competency. We do competency-based interviews; they're behavioral-based interviews and we look at things like in a sales role, drive for results; and in a technical role, it might be the consulting ability that they have.
And the final thing is just their technical knowledge, whether they're a consultant, or a .NET programmer, or a product marketing person. That comes kind of third on our list to the top two.
What do the interviews involve?
The interview part [of the recruitment process] would take about four weeks. We make sure that we let [candidates] know if they're at the top of the list for us, and hopefully we can get through the process quick enough that they bear with us.
We would typically do four or five [interviews], and sometimes we'd try and couple, say, two interviews on one day, so they don't have to keep coming back in and seeing us.
They would have an interview with the recruiter, who's on the recruitment team and would gauge the fit and also their technical ability to some degree. Then they would have an interview with the line manager who would be employing them - the hiring manager, as we call them. The hiring manager would do a deeper dive on their technical ability.
By interviews one and two, we've kind of said, 'yes, they can do the job', and we move on from there to make sure that they would fit with the other people that they would have to come across. The latter two interviews would be with people outside of the immediate group that they would be joining, but who they would perhaps need to interact with on an ongoing basis to do their job.
We're very big on cross-group collaboration. So if you were joining us as an engineer, that would generally be joining us within our services organization; we might have you also interview with a sales account manager, who is somebody that you would perhaps need to have a good working relationship with.
What's the fraction of people you end up hiring from the interviews?
I don't measure that statistic, but anecdotally, I could probably tell you that's one in five.
Sometimes what you'll find with us, particularly on the technical, engineering side, we have a constant need throughout the year that develops. So we might interview a pool of candidates for a particular role, where say two or three of them were good enough for us to employ. We may just hire one of them at that point in time, but in three months or in six months, come back to the candidates.
And we tell them, we communicate that clearly, that 'We think you're great and we want to hire you, we just don't have an opening at the moment, so stay in touch with us'. And again because of our brand being quite strong, we're really lucky that we often are able to ask people to do that, because they really want to join Microsoft.
Do you face any issues with recruitment?
We have a couple of major issues. There's a skill shortage for us in some pockets [of the technical side]. If I use a couple of examples on that: it's difficult for us on our Microsoft Business Suite, the dynamics suite, to get people with Exacta experience. There's a global shortage of that.
And just getting people who have the interpersonal skill to be able to consult with clients, and combine that with a good technical base [is another issue]. We recruit quite a lot of presales people, who we would say are technical people, and what we need is for them to understand Microsoft applications and perhaps have good infrastructure experience, but they also need to be really strong interpersonally because we need to be able to put them into clients and have them advise clients. Sometimes it's a challenge, to have that balance.
Again, the [Microsoft] brand is so strong that we never really have roles that are open for six months or anything like that; the average time to fill a role for us is about six weeks, and at the outset it would be 12 weeks. We would really very rarely have roles that are open for much longer than three months.
Besides the obvious prestige associated with the Microsoft brand, what do you feel are the benefits of working at Microsoft?
We actually survey people on this, and three things come out on top. One, the people that work here; you get to work with a really high calibre of individuals. Another thing that comes up consistently for us as a benefit is the constant challenges; we're quite a dynamic business that has a very wide footprint in terms of different products that we have, so it allows employees to move around and constantly challenge themselves with new challenges.
I think we're very competitive in the market in terms of the remuneration and the benefits that we offer. In our remuneration suite, we have obviously the salary part of that. We also have a lot of benefits that we offer - we offer full health insurance, gym membership, we pay broadband fees and all those sorts of things. We also have a very strong stock award program. With Microsoft it's not stock options that you get, you actually get full share ownership, so it's a very real benefit.
I guess also if you're a technical person, if you work with us, you are at the absolute bleeding edge of what technology is doing because we are the innovators in the Microsoft space.
