Within two days of submitting your resume to Microsoft, you will be contacted by a Talent Sourcing Consultant. From the email address, it appears to be a person from EASI LLC (Enterprise Alliance Systems, Inc).

They require you to fill out a Self-Rating Profile prior to speaking with the consultant.

The consultant is efficient and professional. Their mission is to quickly process you into the system and skillfully extract or deduce your salary information and expectations. A single, noncommittal statement of acceptance to something the consultant says can immediately lead to you being considered for the same job but at a lower job title. Seeing what they did and how skillfully they did it prompted me to immediately purchase a salary negotiation book from Amazon.

They do an excellent job of informing you about what to expect in the interview process, as well as the engineering topics you will be questioned about during the phone interview.

A couple of days later, you will receive a phone interview. The interviewer will immediately state the job title they are interviewing you for (i.e., the lower job title) and whether that is acceptable to you. The interview will not continue unless you say yes.

I was interviewing for a hardware position. I found the interviewer to have only a fraction of the knowledge and experience that I possess. She had a list of questions which she asked. It was a good cross-section of questions. She would write a summary of each of my answers into her laptop. In addition to these questions, she would often ask about best practices, methodology, and design techniques. She was trying to obtain as many of these as possible. Later, I found out why: Microsoft outsources its physical design work.

At the end of the technical interview, the engineer required that you discuss your salary expectations. I've never seen this before. Here was an engineer who could potentially be a co-worker, and yet I was being required to discuss salary.

In my opinion, the Microsoft candidate system is designed to obtain candidates at the lowest salary level. This makes sense, as they are a mature company and their stock price has remained flat for the last 11 years. Their candidate system is not designed to identify and recruit top talent (e.g., Google, Facebook, Apple).

I found it distasteful how Microsoft engineers extract as many best practices, methodologies, and design techniques from its interview candidates without offering anything in return. They are "Takers"; there is no reciprocity.

Overall, because of my experience, I found the interview to be easy. Inexperienced engineers would likely find it difficult.

Microsoft will provide you a list of engineering topics that you will be questioned about during the phone interview.