Organizing and interviewing
Somehow in the past week, my email Inbox climbed to an astonishing 134 messages. Having attended the "Managing Action" training course at Microsoft a few years ago, I am embarassed to admit this. That productivity course advocated having a clean Inbox at the end of the day, because you've filed and sorted and created Outlook tasks for everything that shows up. If you are interested in organizational systems, check out this book written by Sally McGhee, one of the people who devised this method. I like it, though I haven't been great about maintaining the system. If I have less than 50 emails in my Inbox, I'm doing pretty well. Everything here is done via email, it seems. I might get 2 voicemail messages in a week, and those are usually from external people.
I've spent a lot of this week in the nitty-gritty. Reviewing status reports from our TAP buddies and consolidating the info into a scorecard and spreadsheet so I can track our TAP partners' progress, producing the monthly newsletter I send to both our TAP participants and anyone on my team who might even be vaguely interested, updating our Connect website, and conducting a few interviews for an open position on the business side of our team.
Some people think interviewing is a drag, but I'm always honored to be included on interview loops. It's even more gratifying to be included more than once, because it implies that my feedback was valuable. (of course, it could just mean no one else was available for that time slot!) And of course, everytime I switch to a new group, I have to "prove" myself as an interviewer again. I like representing Microsoft to the outside world, which is also why I am happy being a Program Manager with a direct customer-facing role. I like the idea that interviewing here is done by committee so I really have a chance to influence who my co-workers are. At my last company, I was only interviewed by 2 managers before I was offered the job. This practice is easy on the interviewee but doesn't give the rest of the team a chance to determine whether they think they can work with that person.
From my own experience, the Microsoft interview process is a grueling experience, and doesn't get any easier once you are in the company and interviewing for an internal job. (I've been through the whole MS interview loop process 5 times now: twice as an external candidate and three times as an internal one.) But I think it's a decent way to really evaluate whether someone is a good fit for the position and the team. Not perfect, but I think the only better way to determine whether someone is right for the job would be some sort of "work here for a month and we'll see" trial period. Which would be a logistical nightmare for experienced candidates, I think, though it works well for college students (internships). My only real complaint about it, which is mostly from a job-seeker's point of view, is that the process might eliminate some good candidates who would be able to do the job. From a company perspective, though, I guess that's what you'd want - better to err on the side of too restrictive than too lax. My husband will also be going through this process (again) soon, so keep your fingers crossed. :)
If you're interested in finding out more about the Microsoft interview process, check out JobsBlog, which is a great resource and entertaining as well.
If you've been through it, what do you think about the Microsoft interview process? If you haven't, how do they interview at your company? Do you think it works well?
