A bit over a week ago, I finished a short book with one long title: How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle — How the World’s Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers. Aside from the examples of various puzzles and brain teasers (and their answers!), I felt William Poundstone’s book would have been a great magazine article. It was, at times, a stretch to make it book-length. That said, it was a quick read, and everyone in tech likes to learn more about Microsoft. The Redmond company is not the only topic in the book, but Poundstone certainly used that hook well… it’s one of the main reasons I bought the book. Robert Scoble read it, but his notes on the interview process at Microsoft are more to the point and more interesting on a human scale. Chris Sells, another Microsoft employee, has a full page of anecdotes and stories about Microsoft job interviews, including his own. Here’s the full tale of Matt Goyer’s interviews with Amazon and Microsoft. I’ll bet these are highly read within these two companies as well as outside.
The most interesting part for me was the divergence on whether to share information about candidates or not during the interview day. Microsoft does, Amazon does not. I’ve tried it both ways. Certainly, if you share the information, the hiring company can do a good job of saving later interviewers’ time if a candidate isn’t worth it. To me, this just reinforces how important the pre-interview process is because while in-person interviews won’t be a match most of the time, you and your colleagues shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time interviewing unqualified folks. I know one person at Microsoft, and another who was there for five or six years before leaving to do his own thing. Next time I run into them, I’ll have to ask about their experiences. We haven’t been doing much hiring recently, although things are looking better in the future, so maybe I’ll get a chance to try both the Amazon and Microsoft techniques, since there is no corporate mandate or agreed-upon ritual on methods, so far.