Christopher Herlihy 11/15/2012 Mgt 205 Prof.

Vittoria Company Portfolio Recruiting Bill Gates is the reason why Microsoft has reached its current stardom and it was his idea to recruit extremely intelligent staff, favoring intelligence over experience. Gates preference for hiring highly intelligent staff dated back to the start-up days of Microsoft. Paul Allen, the cofounder, and him recruited the brightest people from Harvard University. Gates understood that his employees were his greatest assets, shown by this quote, its the effectiveness of our developers that determines our success and take our 20 best people away, and I will tell you that Microsoft will become an unimportant company. Microsoft has hired the smartest and most driven people and did so in a very aggressively matter. One recruitment strategy would be to source graduates from elite educational facilities such as Harvard, Yale, MIT, Carnegie-Melon and Stanford. Microsoft recruiters would go to these schools in search of the most brilliant and driven people. The recruiters chose to ignore experience and the recruiters were told that it would be preferred if the pre-hire had zero experience. Once a person was selected, they would have to undergo a thorough selection process. The first stage of the selection process was an interview. After the first interview a prehire could be called in again and again up to at least ten interviews. The purpose of the interview was not to test knowledge, but to test cognitive processes such as, problem-solving abilities, and work habits. A candidate could also have to do a technical interview which focused on problemsolving, with the interviewer asking problem scenarios. Candidates will also be asked unexpected questions to test their composure and creative-problem solving skills. Examples of

these questions would be how many times does the person use the word the in a day and describe the perfect TV remote control. After the interview was over, the interviewer would send an e-mail with their decision on the interviewee with the words Hire or No Hire and then comment on the problem area, the future interviewers would use these comments to investigate whatever issues there were with the interviewee. Microsofts interviewing process can be looked at in a make or break way, which meant that the interviewees were always pushed to their limits. If they thrived and survived the interview, this meant they would also thrive and survive in a Microsoft working environment. After the interviewing process is completed, if the majority of interviewers were favorable the interviewee would finally meet with their manager and this manager would make a final hire/no hire decision. After the candidate meets with the manager, one last interview is conducted by someone outside the hiring group; this person is independent and is used for their unbiased opinion. The last person for the hiring process is used as a final check to prevent managers from hiring the wrong people because they have a need to fill a certain position. The importance of hiring the right people can be reflected by Microsofts n minus 1 strategy which basically means less people are employed than required. This strategy is reinforced by hiring the idea of hiring the right people is more important than hiring just to fill a position.

Worked Cited
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