Aloha!

Following in the footsteps of our US colleagues Gretchen and Zoe (Jobblog) James Finuala and I have decided to start up our own site. Similar to Gretchen and Zoe our intended audience is anyone interested in learning more about Microsoft technologies and career opportunities.  Our main focus is to reach industry professionals and graduates interested in pursuing opportunities at Microsoft – we’ll also be providing heaps of useful tips and tricks for those looking for careers in general.    We hope this will help to give a face to the Microsoft Australia recruitment team.

In the coming weeks we’ll be blogging about a number of topics but most importantly we want to hear from you – please let us know what you’d like to see on our blog by posting a comment or sending us an email.

About me….. Julie Brown, Jules, JB soon to be Julie Jani or JJ.

I’ve been working at Microsoft for the past 2 years as a Recruiter working on technical vacancies – basically what that means is  I recruit any role at Microsoft that has a technical focus i.e. Support, Technical Account Manager and Pre-sales  vacancies.

I spent most of my childhood growing up in a small (82 people) town in country NSW where my parents had the local pub.  It was a great time in my life and I made some fantastic friends – it’s my long term goal to return to the country some day.

After finishing school I joined the local newspaper where I worked in advertising sales and sports photography. It was a pretty easy job; most of my clients were friends or friends of my family.  The photography was great fun I spent most of my weekends (when I wasn’t at a B&S Ball) driving around in the work car getting free entry in to all of the local sporting events which I would have been at anyway.  

After a few years I decided to leave the comfort of my friends and family and move to the big city to see what opportunities I could find.   It wasn’t long before I started working for an IT Recruitment agency as an Account Manager – this was back in 98/99 and the for those of you who can remember the industry was booming with companies making a huge investment in technology and not to forget  Y2K – it was happy days.   Sadly the industry did take a turn and with it I made the decision to leave agency recruitment, the sales targets, the ridiculously long hours and the money.  I decided to focus on the parts of recruitment that I still enjoyed so went on the search for an internal role.  It was around this time that I met my fiancé Steve.

Steve – The most fantastic person in the world, the type of person that everyone likes - I’m not just saying that because I’m marrying him in 6 weeks he really is a great guy. 

Anyway enough about me for now over to Finuala and James.