Transitioning from a military to private sector career can be a challenge. All too frequently, our military veterans and active reservists are unable to find positions that utilize their unique skills and experience.

Everyone respects the service of military veterans and reservists, but Microsoft honors their contributions with more than just words. We expressly desire their skills, work ethic and experience. Through Microsoft's We Still Serve community, the company assists veterans and reservists to transition into a cutting-edge career in technology.

The entire process is guided by veterans already at Microsoft who understand the specific challenges of this type of career transition. See the new We Still Serve video below:

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Some of the engineering roles we have at Microsoft are best explained through the stories of the people who do the work day in and day out. Bing is one of the most exciting groups at Microsoft and has very strong, very dedicated Software Development Engineers in Test. This interview is to give insight into the role and to what it’s like to work on a web service at Microsoft. Check out our first Bing SDET interview here.
- Eugenia

'Softie in question: Venkat Narayanan Job title: Senior Test Manager - Bing

Describe the SDET role to our audience in 10 words or less.
Continuously find and report the release readiness of the product.

Venkat, I know you have been a part of Bing since it was known as Live Search.  Why is Bing still your passion and why the SDET role?
I will address the SDET role first. I have been in the test role for 10 years, and wouldn’t do anything else. Program Management and Development have their own attraction, but for me test offers the best of all worlds. You can be extremely creative in how you test, and what test cases you come up with. You can write code as much as you want, and when you want. To me, testers usually have the best overall view of how a product behaves.

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Following my last articles about interviewing at Microsoft (read:Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), many of you asked for some pointers about how to get noticed by a recruiter or how to get your foot in the door at Microsoft. I didn’t respond with a post on the topics because I had already done an interview with The Seattle Times back in April and knew there would be a story was coming out.

Take a look through the article "Online presence helps companies such as Amazon, Expedia and Microsoft notice you" and gain some insight from myself and other recruiters in the industry as well.

I’ll look forward to hearing your specific questions after you read the article. 

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About to graduate or just out of school? Poor job prospects and national economic woes got you down?

Never fear... help is on the way. Call it a bailout for recent college grads.

Today, Microsoft joined 15 other companies in the Invest In America Alliance, a national commitment to increase recent college grad hires. This shot in the arm for recent grad employment levels will result in 10,000 new college grad hires among the 15 participating companies and aims to push grad employment back over 2009 levels.

Have we piqued your interest?

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Recent Microsoft candidate, Aran Donohue, has written about his interview experience for his blog Little Computer Scientist. His story runs from stepping off the plane at Sea-Tac International Airport to taking the red-eye home to Toronto. Aran reflects on everything from his interactions with the Microsoft recruiter to the important suject of coffee in Seattle.

As JobsBlog aims to bring you unvarnished insight into Microsoft and the job interview process, we've run the complete, unchanged story below with the good, bad and ugly of his experience.

Aran's story:
I interviewed onsite at Microsoft this week. Here’s an assortment of thoughts and lessons learned, in roughly chronological order.

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Greg Roth, a Microsoft staffing consultant for LCA, has a vibrant after-hours career as a musician. This weekend, his band is scheduled to open for the Temptations and the Four Tops.  

By Jennifer Warnick

August 22, 2008  

By day, Greg Roth works to recruit talented people to work at Microsoft. By night, he is the one being recruited.  

Roth is a singer, songwriter, and recording artist who plays individually and as part of the band Rococo Blues. He’s about to play his biggest gig yet. Roth, along with his vocal coach Emily McIntosh and band mates, will be the opening act for the Temptations and the Four Tops at 7 p.m. on Sunday at the Tulalip Amphitheatre. The amphitheatre is on the Tulalip Reservation, about 30 miles north of Seattle.

It’s a dream come true for Roth, whose friends in the music community call him G-Ro. The amphitheatre, which is almost sold out, holds 3,000 people. It will be his largest crowd ever. Even better, he gets to open for two legendary Motown acts that have inspired him. “It’s pretty big, because it’s the Temptations. That name means something, and the music means something, and those songs are classic,” Roth said. “These guys were it, and their songs still hold up and resonate with people to this day, even though they were written 40 years ago.”  

Born into a household of musicians, Roth has loved music all his life. But it was his lead role in the play “Godspell” at Capitol High School in Olympia that got him started as a performer. After being in various rock bands in college, Roth moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music. He wrote songs, did vocal work on music demo projects, auditioned and got a callback for the TV show “Fame,” and worked as an extra at the 1987 Grammy Awards. “They needed people to be on stage with Billy Idol,” Roth said. “So there I was backstage hanging out with Steve Winwood, Paul Simon, and Run DMC.”  

Rather than pursue a career as a pop star, Roth decided to focus on music he liked, influenced by musicians like Peter Gabriel; James Brown; Prince; and Earth, Wind & Fire. He has recorded music solo, and his current band, Rococo Blues, has a busy schedule playing at festivals, clubs, and corporate events. “I became disillusioned with the music business but never became disillusioned with the music,” Roth said. “I decided to do it my own way in my own studio and just put it out there. Now with things like MySpace and Facebook, you don’t need a record company to be able to get your music out to an audience. I don’t have an illusion of wanting to become a star—I’m a little past my prime for that. I do it because I love the music.”  

Up to now, Roth, a nine-year Microsoft employee, has maintained a relatively low profile about his music at work. “It’s not something you talk about,” he said. “Music is something you just do.” Some coworkers have seen Roth play, but not many. “Every once in a while I get people from work who come to check us out,” he said.  

In March, coworker Nathalie Becker saw his band play at Julia’s on Broadway in Seattle. “The entire crew I was with had an awesome time,” she said. “Often, when bands are playing in a place where folks eat food and enjoy adult beverages, people just sit at their tables. Listening and watching Greg’s band, the energy—the great performance—they put on from the stage and room, really gets you up and dancing. Even the men danced. Usually it’s just the girls that get up and cut a rug.”  

The closest Roth has come to performing at work was at a human resources party two years ago where there was “rockaroke” (karaoke with a live band). He sang “Brick House” by the Commodores. Lisa Brummel approached him after he sang and complimented him on his voice. “I was really flattered,” he said. “That made me feel good. That’s why I do it—it’s about putting a smile on people’s faces.”  

Roth, who is a shorts and flip-flops kind of guy in the office, takes it up a notch for his gigs. He wears dark suits, colored shirts, bright ties and shoes, and other “classy yet cool” ensembles that capture the retro vibe of artists such as Otis Redding.

On Sunday, before the Temptations and the Four Tops sing their Motown hits, Roth and his cohorts will perform classic covers like “Midnight Train to Georgia,” “Natural Woman,” “Chain of Fools,” “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” and “some really classic soul songs that fit with the spirit of the show. The entire evening will be a trip down memory lane,” he said.  

“Those songs are the soundtracks to people’s lives,” Roth said. “It takes them back to a time when things were perhaps a little more simple and maybe less complicated. Those songs mean something to them like they do to me.”  

Roth said he doesn’t do it for the money but for the joy music brings to other people. “For me it’s just the pure joy of performing the songs that I love with my friends, and to see people smiling and swaying to the music—that’s what I get out of it. I love putting on the best show I can, baring my soul, and having people really enjoy the music and forget about some of the challenges and stress of their day.”  

Listen to Greg Roth’s music and Rococo Blues on MySpace.

Social tools show job applicants what it’s really like to work at Microsoft.

By Steve Birge

Anybody who’s looked for a new job knows that the job posting rarely gives a real sense of what it would be like to work at the new place. It’s particularly challenging if the position is new or rare.That’s exactly the problem staffing consultant Terry Jordan was having when he filled an escalation engineer position recently. Applications were few, and people he did hear from were confused about what an escalation engineer does. At a global staffing conference, he met colleagues who suggested adding a podcast of an escalation engineer talking about what the job entails.

“People wouldn’t apply because they wanted to do more development,” Jordan said. “In reality, an escalation engineer is not just sitting on the phone talking to a customer; a lot of [the work] is digging into the code, looking at source code.” Interest quickly picked up after he added the podcast. “The number of resumes coming in tripled, and employee referrals doubled.” Scott Oseychik was interviewed for the podcast about his work and life as an escalation engineer. Production of the podcast was simple, free, and quick. Doing the interview, editing it, and putting stock music behind it took a bit more than an hour, he said.Microsoft has several nontraditional, social-oriented recruiting initiatives, said Gretchen Ledgard, a marketing manager in Staffing Marketing who started Microsoft’s JobsBlog. Her team manages View<myWorld>, a Web site where visitors can read blogs and look more deeply at various jobs across the company; Microspotting, which Ledgard calls “the People magazine of Microsoft;” the Workin' It @ MSFT Facebook page; the Hey Genius college recruiting site; and an internal site, Spread the Love, which helps employees evangelize for the company themselves. All the sites are designed to help people who are thinking about applying or already interviewing for a new job. “Once they’re in the process, we’re giving them tools they’ll need to prepare,” Ledgard said. “It’s a self-sustaining support system, and it’s also one-to-many communication, rather than a recruiter telling people the same information over and over.”

"As the reach of social media grows, some companies are going to virtual worlds like Second Life to get the word out on their job listings. Microsoft participated in Second Life’s first virtual career fair last fall," Ledgard said.

"Expect more of the same in the future," Jordan said.

“What we’re doing really falls in line with a lot of what recruiting is doing in general, which is a lot more use of social networks,” he said. “It’s not really anything unusual, just a little unorthodox.” He said using virtual worlds for recruiting is a bit extreme, but necessary to woo the best people to Microsoft. "Virtual-world recruiting fits in with Microsoft’s interest in uncommon, technology-based recruiting techniques, even if it is not yet a core part of its recruiting strategy," Ledgard said.

“Microsoft is doing some of the most innovative recruiting of any tech company out there,” she said. “Some companies have focused on stunts and ad campaigns, but we’re really focused on being open and transparent and fostering impactful and meaningful connections with applicants. And it’s working.”

So there's this anonymous Microsoft blogger who goes by the name of Mini-Microsoft. He's been around for ages, grumping about Microsoft and offering his cranky advice about how the company could be improved. Mini's gained a lot of credibility as an MSFT watchdog, and was recently featured in Business Week.

I love Mini (every enormous global company should have an anonymous bitchy blogger -- seriously!) and recently added him on Facebook. It was over on Mini's Facebook page that I found this awesome wall posting:

Hey Mini, I wanted to let you know that I am a recently hired level 59. I am a top student from a top program (which of course means SHIT until I start seriously producing for the company). One of the main reasons I chose Microsoft over my other extremely gratuitous offers was because of your blog. Yes, I understand one of your overall messages involves frowning upon my entrance because I'm initially another face in the crowd who initially may not add much to the bottom line. Yes, I understand your blog magnifies and makes public many operational problems at MSFT. Yes, I understand your blog has caused many potential hires to be scared. But when I read mini-microsoft, I get excited, because I realize the problems you write about are solvable and more important they are worth solving because of the potential this company has. So I guess what I’m trying to say is…. Thank you….

I love this! I firmly believe that the best way for any company (MSFT included) to attract smart, awesome folks is to be honest and forthcoming about its shortcomings and weak points -- after all, those are the areas of the company that theoretically need the brightest superstars and problem-solvers, right? So Mini -- I salute you! Thanks for being the crabby voice that no-one wants to hear, but everyone listens to.