I applied through an employee referral. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in May 2014
Interview
I was contacted about a job opening by someone I knew in the company. I uploaded my resume for the position, and a few weeks later was contacted by HR to be screened, and invited in to be interviewed. One of the interviews was conducted via Skype, but the others were in-person. The interviewing was thoughtful, and questions included my skills knowledge to fulfill the technical aspect of the role, strategic thinking, innovation and creativity, and questions that would indicate how well I might fit into the team.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Not a difficult question nor unexpected, but I was asked what was the highest level executive to which I had ever presented.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Microsoft (Cambridge, MA) in Jan 2014
Interview
Travel and accommodation arranged by friendly, professional staff. Whole day interview to talk to 6 people. Topics covers both project/program management and domain knowledge (speech, NLP, dialog). It was nice experience
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Aug 2013
Interview
While I was working at Microsoft as a vendor, a PM with whom I'd worked approached me to ask if I might be interested in applying for a Senior PM position he would be hiring and for which he thought I would be a good fit.
I applied online and he indicated to HR that he wanted me in the candidate pool. They scheduled a day of interviews in the form of Lync meetings, which I found tricky because I didn't have the benefit of meeting with the interviewers face-to-face.
I made it through the full day of interviews but didn't hear from them for weeks. I pinged my original contact a couple of weeks later and he let me know that the individual members of team with which I'd interviewed couldn't agree on the qualities they were looking for or what they hoped the person in the position would actually do so they couldn't agree that I was the person for the job. Ultimately he let me know that half the team wanted me but the other half were undecided. They opted not to hire the position at all until they could agree on the specifics about the role. I believe they still haven't hired.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
My second interviewer led off by asking me "Which domains do you think we should focus on in our solution?" Given 1) my lack of technical expertise in the area; and 2) that I was interviewing for a management position, I thought that was a pretty tough question to start with.