Microsoft JobsBlog: Blog

Tell me more about Support at Microsoft

The JobsBloggers — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:40:00 GMT

Dear JobsBlog: What can you tell me about working in technical support at Microsoft? I see a lot of info on what it’s like to work on an engineering team but not a lot about support. Help!

-Support Guru

Dear Support Guru: I asked Heather from the Microsoft Customer Service & Support Careers Blog to stop by and share how to learn more about careers in Customer Service & Support (CSS). Others have been asking for more info on CSS, too, so look for more technical support and services careers info here on JobsBlog soon!

Gretchen

Get connected with Microsoft Customer Service and Support
By Heather McGough

I gotta tell you, I am one of those girls who gets giddy when asked “Who do you work for?” I get butterflies in my stomach as I start to say the word – Microsoft. Then we go into the pleasantries of “What do you do there?” I answer, “Recruiter” and usually eyes get a little wider. But when I say, “Yes, I recruit Escalation Engineers for Customer Service and Support,” I lose everyone’s attention.

Here’s what most people don’t know: In CSS, we hire some of the industry’s most technical engineers. They can get into the code, break it, fix it, and make it work smarter and faster. They sweep in like super heroes when companies are having technical complications and save the day. And for many of Microsoft’s customers, we are the human "face" of Microsoft. Working by phone and e-mail, our engineers address common issues and route challenges to appropriate support resources, such as product support professionals and engineers.

So what does it take to work in CSS? We’re looking for smart, quick, personable individuals who are committed to helping people. Customer service is generally the place to begin a career in the Microsoft support department. However, think of Microsoft entry-level positions as escalator positions: as a customer service employee, you receive world-class in-house training to keep abreast of the latest technologies. This can be a springboard to many rewarding career opportunities throughout the company.

Now, want to learn more? Join us, follow us, learn about us across the web:

On Facebook – watch our status updates for news, job postings or even fun pictures of our worldwide campuses
On Twitter – Get a quick note from Microsoft Customer Service on what’s happening
On LinkedIn – Join our discussion group and network with other professionals
On our Blog – Take a trip around the world with us as we profile different sites, the teams and how diverse each of these locations are – from culture to the benefits Microsoft offers

We know … you probably follow a ton of tweeters already and are members of Facebook fan pages. What’s one more? One that is valuable, one that could potentially land you, a friend or family member a job?

Preparing your online profile for employers

The JobsBloggers — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:13:00 GMT

In a phone interview during my last job hunt, an interviewer (not at Microsoft) asked me if I had a Facebook account. Since we weren’t meeting in person, he wanted to put a face with the name.

It made sense that he would want a visual, but my heart sunk when I thought about what he might see: “Am I holding a martini glass in my profile picture? Did I set my birthday party photos to private? Will he be able to access the outlandish comments friends post on my wall?”

You can imagine my relief when I found that I had indeed set my profile to private and my photo was a smiley (and alcohol-free) version of my face. But this experience got me thinking: How can job seekers prepare their social networking profiles for employers’ eyes?

1. Set your profile to private: The most obvious solution, changing your settings can block users who aren’t your friends from searching for you or seeing your profile. You can also limit which friends can see your profile, so if you happen to be connected with a potential employer, you’re able to restrict what they can and can’t see. Here’s more information on Facebook privacy and MySpace privacy.

2. Un-tag or remove inappropriate photos: Just because your college buddies love the snapshot of you riding a mechanical bull while double fisting red Solo cups does not mean an employer will be a fan of your debauchery. Remember the heat Obama’s speech writer took for his Hillary cutout photos? It’s a good idea to ask friends to avoid tagging you, and you can self-censor what you post. You can also block specific networks from seeing certain photo albums.

3. Avoid writing negatively about the employer: Anything you post online can and will be read by someone – whether it’s the employer or someone connected to the employer. The “Cisco fatty” is just one example of how you can ruin your chances of being hired by knocking an employer on the web.

4. Add apps and join groups selectively: The Commando Fridays group might have been a great inside joke with your former colleagues but it could have a potential employer raising an eyebrow at your application. On the other hand, joining a group created by an industry society could reflect positively. Click “join” wisely!

5. Create personal and professional profiles: Having one profile intended for friends and another for employers can be useful. For example, I only accept Facebook friend requests from people I know socially (whether that’s at work or outside of it). I use my LinkedIn account to connect with people I know professionally (some I’ve worked with closely, others I’ve only met once or twice at company meetings). Rejecting a friend request from a professional can be a little awkward, but sending a personal and polite message explaining why you’ve denied them will get you through.

With one out of five employers using social networking sites to learn about candidates, these are tips you’ll want to consider. Still, it’s good to keep in mind that employers aren’t out to get you on the web. They’re simply tapping into the wealth of online resources to get a better sense of who they might be working with. If you have some of your own profile preparation advice, please share on the comment board!

-Meghan

Tips and Advice vs Giving Away the Farm: My $0.02

The JobsBloggers — Fri, 15 May 2009 18:16:00 GMT

Now that you’ve seen where I’m coming from in terms of tips and advice, I feel it’s time to introduce my top six pieces of Kenji® branded recruiter advice. Handle with care!

1. Your interview is a two-way street: You should want to know as much about the team, product and position you’re interviewing for as the team wants to know about you. If not, time to take a step back and question why you’re interviewing in the first place. Sorry, I know the economy is horrible, but just wanting a job is not a good enough reason.

2. Be prepared: Do your research. Though job descriptions (in my opinion) are usually a poor representation of any job, it’s a good idea to read the job description before interviewing and understand the basics for the team and position you’re interviewing for. Know up front if you’re interviewing for a SDE, SDET or PM position, and try to do a search on the team name to learn more about what they do. Better yet – if the team is product focused, see if you can find it and download it/try it out. I could go on and on about this one topic alone (and just might – hint, hint).

3. Your interview is a conversation: Make sure you understand the question that’s being asked before answering, and create a dialog. Don’t be afraid to ask questions to clarify, state assumptions or restate the problem. (This applies to problem solving, coding, testing, even HR questions.)

4. Your interview should mimic real life: Okay, so I get that you probably aren’t going to get many of the coding or problem solving questions again in your day-to-day job. But the focus here is on the interaction itself. Stepping through a coding question on a white board should emulate how you might collaborate and problem solve on the job. How do you explain your thoughts? Why did you choose path A instead of path B? Do you jump at the answer or step through and arrive there logically? This is kind of an extension on bullet three.

5. Don’t try to impress the interviewer – just be yourself: This kind of goes back to what I was saying about integrity in my previous post. But there’s also a more technical point to this. As I said, we want you to be your very best, but it’s not an uncommon mistake that a candidate gets so caught up in trying to impress the interviewer that they go on a time consuming tangent or try to give an overly complex response to a simple answer. A better strategy is to give a concise, to-the-point answer and then offer up detail or optimizations. (Again, this applies to either HR or coding questions.)

6. Don’t give up unless you mean it (or are told to): Be complete in your responses. Not to confuse with my last point, but understand the difference between a concise answer and an incomplete one. For some topics (like listing ideas or test cases) don’t stop until you’re out of examples or the interviewer tells you to.

There you have it. For what it’s worth, this is the advice I feel every candidate should know going into the interview. So, tell me: Did I help you be a better ambassador or did I give away the farm?

-Kenji

Strengths and weaknesses revisited

The JobsBloggers — Thu, 14 May 2009 02:51:05 GMT

Not long after JobsBlog started in 2004, Gretchen answered a reader who wanted to know what he should say when an interviewer asked him to describe his strengths and weaknesses. Five years later, that post is still one of the most popular articles on this site. Gretchen’s advice remains relevant, of course, and we encourage you to read it – but we thought we’d give you an update from varying viewpoints. Check out what Kenji, Lisa and Matt have to say about this infamous interview question!

I used to ask this question as part of my regular morning interview, though it has mostly faded from my rotation. My best advice is to be up-front and honest. When I asked this question, I was primarily looking for three things: confidence (What are you proud of?); self-evaluation (What do you want to improve?); and desire (What do you plan to do about it?). Sometimes candidates became agitated, maybe because they thought I was trying to trick them or get them to self-select out of consideration. In these cases, I tried to rephrase and provide context: Nobody’s perfect, but I want to know what are you good at, and where you think you could improve. On the flip side, the worst responses are: Not saying anything, giving a canned response, or changing the subject and trying to avert the question.

I’ll admit; I used to ask this question. For me, the “greatest strength and weakness” question determines whether you can give an honest assessment of your skills and yourself. What I looked for in the answer was a true weakness, however, I also was looking to see if the candidate was working on the weakness or found a way to overcome their weakness. For example, a weakness could be that you’re afraid of speaking in front of a large audience. A couple of ways to mitigate it might be that you’ve been taking public speaking classes or presenting at brown bags to build your confidence. Remember though, you don’t want to sell yourself out of the position, so be sure the weakness is something that, when worked on, can turn into a strength.

I’ve had a lot of heated debates about this question as its one of my least favorite to ask or answer. Still, since not answering is a less than ideal option, I recommend for your strength, to come up with the one word that best personifies your personal “brand” – what makes you who you are – and share an example of how you’ve delivered that. For weakness, my advice would be to mention a past challenge you have long since overcome. As long as you address any weakness with “and this is what I did to overcome that” you’re showing growth – and awareness!

Tips and Advice vs Giving Away the Farm: Is there such a thing?

The JobsBloggers — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:34:32 GMT

I admit -- this is a concept I struggle with. Like I’ve said in previous posts, as your recruiter I want you to be set up for success, and I want to help provide the toolbox to get you there. But at the same time, I also want you to do well on your own horsepower as much as possible.

It’s a frustrating conundrum. I want you to succeed, but I want you to interview as you -- perhaps the best representation of you, but still you. Paraphrasing Chris Rock’s joke on dating describes it almost perfectly: When you’re on a first date, you’re not you. You’re the ambassador of you.

This is kind of how it is during a job interview. You’re not quite yourself -- you’re portraying the best version of yourself. Interview tips and advice can serve to improve awareness and help you become a better ambassador -- but it’s a fine line. And at what point does the person following advice no longer become the best version of themselves, but the version of themselves I want to see?

Deep, huh?

This is a conversation I’ve had with many peers and hiring managers. It’s always a fun and interesting exercise to go through. In the end, I think there are two values held in high esteem at Microsoft that help to balance this out: honesty and integrity. In my opinion, this is part of why we have each candidate interview with a minimum of three or four Microsofties. Most recruiters (and trained interviewers) are pretty good at catching inconsistencies. And though most candidates are capable of searching the net for all sorts of advice, it’s tough to fake it if you don’t mean it. Probability dictates that inconsistencies will surface when examined at the macro level.

So what do you think? Is there a difference between advising a candidate and leading a candidate? Sound back. I’d like to hear your thoughts!!

In the meantime, stay tuned for my next post where I’ll be putting together a list of my favorite interview advice.

-Kenji

Add some pow to your resume

The JobsBloggers — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:30:00 GMT

My mom recently asked me to review her resume, and so did some of her friends (one of the joys of being a recruiter). These are all very accomplished healthcare executives, but their resumes lacked the pow that I find in resumes of candidates I usually choose to move forward with. It wasn’t because they weren’t stellar professionals, but because they didn’t present their skills in the most advantageous way.

For most of us, when we sit down to work on our resumes, we think to ourselves, “What do I do in this position?” While this is relevant information, you can share it in a way that has that extra “umph” recruiters want to see. When you’re looking for what to put on your resume, instead of thinking about what your job entails, think of what you’ve accomplished. I’m not saying leave out the day-to-day tasks of your job, but what speaks louder is what you accomplished.

In other words, you want to call out what you “Made, Saved and Achieved” (MSA):

• Made the company (money, sales, etc.)
• Saved the company (money, time, etc.)
• Achieved personally (awards, recognition, etc.)

Here are some examples:

What you did	What you did with pow
Developed a test automation framework	Developed a test automation framework reducing company/team testing time from 3 days to 12 hours
Managed and optimized online advertising campaigns	Optimized a poorly performing ad campaign resulting in a decrease of cost per action by 50 percent
Streamlined development process	Enabled our development team to ship our product one month early by streamlining our development process

MSA also plays well in interviews. In this competitive market, employers want people who are able to produce results. Don’t be shy – wow ‘em with some pow!

-Ryan

P.S. - Shout out to Sue Danbom, a national trainer at Volt for teaching me all about MSA!

What resume advice do you want to hear?

The JobsBloggers — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:17:08 GMT

As we continue to work on our new careers site, we've come up with another topic that we'd like to hear your thoughts on: resume tips. This one is particularly important to us here at JobsBlog since resumes is one of our favorite subjects to blog about.

The question is: What types of tips and tricks are most helpful as you prepare your resume for a job at Microsoft? Would you like to see more advice from Microsoft recruiters specifically regarding jobs at Microsoft (rather than general job advice)? If so, what kinds of tips would be most useful coming from us? What other resources do you currently use to prepare your resume? Which are most helpful, and why?

We want to know what we can do to best help you prepare your resume for jobs at Microsoft -- so don't hold back! Comment away!

-Meghan

Skills for the future

The JobsBloggers — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:27:00 GMT

Whether you're seeking employment or already have your dream job, it's always beneficial to learn new technical skills. Picking up knowledge that you can talk about in an interview and use on the job, can have a huge impact on an employer. But in a field that's constantly changing, how do you know which skills to hone in on? Here's an awesome list from TechRepublic's Justin James of the 10 skills developers will need in the next five years:

1. One of the “Big Three” (.NET, Java, PHP)
2. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)
3. Web development
4. Web services (REST, SOAP, JSON, XML)
5. Soft skills
6. One dynamic and/or functional programming language
7. Agile methodologies
8. Domain knowledge
9. Development “hygiene”
10. Mobile development

Read the full article here, and let us know what you think about Justin's advice!

-Meghan

How to search jobs by keywords on the Microsoft Careers site

The JobsBloggers — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

As most of you know by now, there are thousands of job postings on the Microsoft Careers site. It can be more than overwhelming to look through all of them and find just the right one.

Some attempt to look by selecting only Job Titles, Job Categories or Products. Selecting a title or product category can definitely be beneficial to narrowing down your job search, especially if you know the exact Microsoft product you would like to work on. But some of our emerging products are not yet listed in the drop-down fields. There might be some very interesting groups that you are qualified to work for that you have yet to hear about!

The same thing goes with titles: They don’t always translate from company to company. If you rely on titles alone, you could be missing out on some really interesting opportunities.

So, take a few moments, think about what it is that you do in your current position (or what you aspire to do at Microsoft) and create a list of keywords. If you are interested in Server Technology, think about all the things that can encompass (SQL, security, routers, etc.) or Game Development (entertainment, automation, graphics, Xbox, etc.).

Once your list of keywords is ready, enter them into the optional Keywords search field (found below the Job Titles and Job Categories menus) and see what you come up with! An added tip: after you get your search results from entering keywords, sort by Title or Category. You never know what you might find that could be of interest and a great fit for your skills!

Happy hunting!

-Angela

What's your social media story?

The JobsBloggers — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:56:00 GMT

All the hubbub lately about Twitter (Google acquisition? No acquisition? – Originally read through Scoble) has made me a bit curious about the new trends in social media.

Heck, even Mini-Microsoft (the mystery Microsoft blogger) started Twittering, so you know it’s time to start paying attention!

Last Friday, I finally broke down and started my own Twitter account. (Started is kind of a loose term... I’ve had it for a year, just never used it!) Then today – after seeing a ton of Tweets about the updated FriendFeed Beta, I decided to sign up and give that a try also. Now that I’m busy going about building yet another social network, it’s got me thinking: Do people really find jobs using these? As a recruiter, I’ve found several excellent employees through social networking sites (namely LinkedIn and Facebook – see Ryan’s recent post for more). But Twitter? The Micro-Blog? I’ve heard stories – mostly through someone who knows someone, who knows someone who hired or was hired through Twitter. But these only carry so much weight. I want to hear it from you!

So, tell me: What’s your social media story? How has the world of social networks helped you land that perfect job? Do you use Twitter? FriendFeed? Looking forward to your comments!

Oh, and while I’m at it -- feel free to connect: My Windows Live; My LinkedIn; My Twitter; My Facebook; My FriendFeed.

-Kenji