The process took one day. It was for a data engineer role. I got it without a referral. People at Microsoft were saying it was internal and they were not able to give a referral. The position was not finalised. I got a call from an HR representative who highly valued past experience after full-time work over project and internship experience. He said 16L in hand was the highest he could give to an SDE 1. He asked what I had worked on, and he didn't like my being stubborn in my salary ask.

It was a first HR call round. The call was mainly asking about salary expectations and then asking to come into the office in Bengaluru.