Back in my personal blog (a writing experience that lasted a year) - I had chronicled a 3 part story of how i got into microsoft. The gist of it was defiance, and a whole lot of positive connotations, but this wkend the darkside of the force seems to be strong, so lets go with defiance. There are 2 angles to this:

a. Tepper was simply not a core-school to recruit at for Microsoft back then. The argument was an interesting circular logic which perpetuated itself. It goes like this - "The historic recruiting numbers are what helps companies invest in recruiting at schools, and with that investment comes a lot of support to the school with alums flying over, headcount to be closed from that school which in turn gets the top students excited abt the company, which translates to great recruiting numbers which fulfills the investment ROI question." Ofcourse schools that already had a strong alumni contingent perpetuated this well, schools that were top on the rankings and didnt have the same numbers to begin with, maintained the numbers.

One of Project Firenze's outcomes was to help change this self-fulfilling prophecy, because truthfully it is a tough cycle to beat - but it has to be.

b. Microsoft Services historically recruited from the industry on the back of solid experience. This was quite the opposite from many groups on the other side of Microsoft which had several executives (Chris Capossela, Lisa Brummel etc) , who literally built their fantastic careers from being an intern. Infact Services which had over 15K ppl worldwide did not have interns ever. There was excellent reasoning for this, since most roles in the org are client-facing senior roles typically, but the fact that MBA interns could add value at corp/HQ roles was not favoured as much as getting field-experienced talent in those roles. Again great opportunity to boost some fresh thinking which was not leveraged.

Project Firenze changed this too. In 2006/07 (year 1) we had 3 interns coming in of which 4 converted to fulltime hires. In 2007/08 We have 5 interns - 3 in Redmond (HQ) and 2 in Latin America HQ.

Defiance from the norm of thinking quite easily started Firenze, but the results are there on several levels. More posts will share the details of every single step we went through from organization to hypothesis to the actual experience and the current roles.