I applied for a software engineer role at Microsoft through their online portal.

A few days later, I received an email from a recruiter who invited me to a screening call.

The call lasted about 45 minutes and consisted of two parts:

• A resume review
• A technical assessment

The resume review was fairly straightforward. The recruiter asked me about my previous projects, my skills, and my motivations for working at Microsoft. They also asked me some behavioral questions.

The technical assessment was more challenging. The recruiter asked me some questions on data structures and algorithms, such as how to reverse a linked list, how to find the kth largest element in an array, and how to implement a hash map. They also asked me to write code for one of the problems on a shared editor.

I chose to use Python as my programming language and explained my approach and the complexity of my solution. The recruiter gave me some feedback and hints along the way.

How to reverse a linked list?

How to find the kth largest element in an array?

How to implement a hash map?