I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (New Delhi) in Mar 2022
Interview
Technical interviews are very good. Interaction with Microsoft engineers is a real good learning experience.
HR recruiters especially the Careernet contract folks are very un-professional. I think they are only paid to schedule the interviews. Once the interviews are done, they simply go on radio silence. Have some empathy towards candidates who spend lot of efforts and time for big companies like Microsoft. We deserve atleast a No if not a complete feedback. Don't keep us hoping for a call from you forever.
Even a small office that has 50 to 100 employees has a better hiring process than Microsoft.
Another observation is, some of the job posts that they are scheduling are already in-active. Why schedule and later say that the requisition is closed?
Why are so many jobs posts are open for more than 6 to 8 months? Something really mysterious.
Folks, try for other big companies that have better recruiters. Don't waste your precious time for Microsoft India. It's not worth it.
Started with a recruiter phone call and a 30 minute phone call with the hiring manager to negotiate a remote role since the job was based in Seattle and the manager agreed. Following up with five rounds of virtual on site. Four of them are coding/design. One of them is behavioral mostly leetcode medium level questions which I finished and I was able to do all the follow up and answer the design and time complexity questions correctly after the interview got ghosted for a whole month and got an automatic rejection email.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leet code medium level questions. DFS, BFS, sliding windows and greedy algorithm. Follow up, asking some design questions and the time complexity of the code.
Phone interview with hiring manager for 45 minutes primarily a tech interview. Focused on questions directly related to tech stack. Come prepared knowing design questions and how those conversations go.