Office 2007 Enterprise blog you-are-recruiters-so-

Lately, Zo"e and I have received increasingly more requests from viewers who need to communicate with us about the open positions for which we recruit or want to know a lot more concerning the internal teams we assistance. Our responses have been for the effect of, “Well, we don’t really recruit on any specific open positions or assistance any specific teams. But we can ensure your resume is in our database for other recruiters to review.”

What? We are recruiters yet we don’t carry a requisition load? What the heck do we do?

Ah, good question, and I sometimes wonder the same thing.

Zo"e and I've talked about our roles here and there over the past several months, but I don’t think we’ve ever fully explained just what it is we do for Microsoft.

Officially, we are titled “Central Sourcing Consultants,” even though we still refer to ourselves as plain ol’ recruiters. We are members of our Technical Central Sourcing Team, and along with the other members of our team,Office Pro, we are tasked with identifying and delivering top industry talent for mid-level Software Development Engineer, Software Design Engineer in Test, Software Test Engineer, and Program Manager roles across the company for US based positions. You can think of our roles as a hybrid of traditional recruiting and marketing/outreach.

Without getting too deep into logistics, we basically populate qualified resumes into general “pipes” within our in-house applicant tracking system (ATS). We ourselves do not work directly with any open positions. We don’t have intimate knowledge of specific needs within the businesses. We don’t evaluate candidates for particular roles. We just wish to ensure we get the best people considered for our SDE, SDET, STE, and PM roles,Office 2007 Enterprise, and then the torch is passed to the other type of recruiters to make the connections between great talent and current openings.

Who is this “other type of recruiter?” Well, on the other side of the fence, you have our “Staffing Consultants” who are aligned by businesses. Think of these people as your true corporate recruiters. You have a couple Staffing Consultants for Office, a Staffing Consultant for Visual Studio, etc. These recruiters account manage a specific team, or “client group,” and develop and execute a sourcing (finding candidates) and screening (evaluating candidates) strategy against the team’s current openings.

I just searched our careers site, and as of right now,Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, we have 381 Software Development Engineer (SDE) positions, 287 Software Design Engineers in Test (SDET) positions, 67 Software Test Engineer (STE) positions, and 319 Program Manager (PM) positions open across our business groups. And those numbers just include US based positions that are reserved for people who have at least one year of post-graduate industry experience. (Our College Recruiting team works with their own openings that are not listed on our corporate careers site, and our international openings are listed on separate websites.)

That’s a whole lot of open positions, and those numbers just indicate the positions open at this moment in time – not future positions that will open throughout the year.

So where do Zo"e and I spend our time? First and foremost, we have to meet our short-term, tactical goals, and those,Office Pro 2010 Key, simply put, center around ensuring the most qualified SDE, SDET,Office 2007 Enterprise, STE, and PM candidates are filtered and entered into our ATS so that Staffing Consultants can easily identify the best talent for their openings. We do this by sourcing a combination of active, semi-passive, and passive candidates.

But we also spend a lot of time developing long-term strategies. These long-term initiatives are what Zo"e and I are both most passionate about and where we believe we can make the biggest impact on the future our organization and company. How do we drive more qualified traffic to our careers site? How do we educate potential applicants on the available opportunities throughout the company? How do develop pools of talent for positions that may open 5, 10, even 15 years down the road? How do we position Microsoft Staffing as the premier corporate recruiting organization in terms of innovation and results? Let us know if you have any ideas.

So if you are sitting at home thinking, “Gee, I know Gretchen and Zo"e know I’m interested in a job with Microsoft so why don’t they interview me?,” just know that (as long as you’ve applied via our careers site!) your resume is in our database, and if your experience and interests match our general SDE, SDET, STE, and PM profiles across the company, we’ll do our darnest on the back-end to ensure your resume is reviewed by the “real” recruiters.

gretchen