Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus blog partn

Thanks so a lot for the amazing feedback on Hello. This really is SupportCo on behalf of Wonderful Corp. Now, for that story behind the story …

I’ve written quite a bit about the charter of my team, but in a nutshell, we are tasked with helping match the right applicants with the right openings / recruiters. We ourselves do not recruit on specific requisitions, but we instead recruit against broad profiles (SDE, SDET, PM, and STE) all across the company.

Right now, my team is very small. Beside me, it consists of Zo"e (who needs no introduction), Rob (our fearless manager),Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, and John (an interesting character you’ve yet to hear from but someone I should definitely enlist to write a guest entry.) Four of us recruiting and routing against a pipeline that needs to fill hundreds and hundreds of positions a year is quite a daunting feat.

As I see it, our team has two main missions: 1) To assist our overloaded, overworked business aligned recruiters by filtering to them applicants who map to our core profiles and 2) raising our customer (applicant) satisfaction by making our processes more manageable and, most importantly, more fruitful for everyone involved. You can probably tell from reading the blog that Zo"e and I are most passionate about the second mission. If it were up to us, we’d market Microsoft careers all day, everyday.

But it’s not. We also have to accomplish mission one, and having been an overloaded, overworked business aligned recruiter in the past, I strongly believe that if you solve the first problem, you are well on your way to solving the second problem. More efficient recruiters equal an improved applicant experience.

The question is … how can you utilize my and Zo"e’s passion and talents of community outreach, networking, evangelism, etc (because I think, in the long-term, that work is paramount to positioning Microsoft as a top employer of choice) with the everyday ins and outs of building pipelines for today’s needs?

Our answer was to partner with another company.

Before readers immediately jump to the thought of “outsourcing,” a couple comments here. First, we are working with an outside company to enhance our offering and increase of efficiency. No Microsoft employees or their jobs were harmed in the making of this partnership. Secondly, Microsoft keeps more HR/Recruiting resources in-house than any other large corporation I know. We occasionally need outside assistance to meet our aggressive hiring goals, but at no time will we ever “outsource” our recruiting function. It just won’t happen.

Back to the partnership with another company ….

My scenario in Hello there. This is SupportCo on behalf of Great Corp is just what we are doing now. Zo"e, John, and I review resumes after they enter our database. Of the ones that appear to map to our core profiles, we “tag” and later forward a name, email address, and phone number to our partner company who then contacts the applicants to gather some additional details that we feel is of utmost importance to accurately route applicants to the right roles / recruiters. The partner company then sends the details back to us, and we personally review the data and route the applicants as appropriate. The end goal here is that we can increase the connections between applicants and recruiters … and for your applicants who have responded to our requests, our new system is working wonderful. When I log into our ATS (Applicant Tracking System), I can see the connections being made! This extra step helps recruiters, and it really helps applicants.

Reading through the comments on Hi. This really is SupportCo on behalf of Great Corp, I am very aware of the concerns surrounding this method, and we are already working with our partner company to smooth out some details. They have read all your comments. We have read all your comments. We’ll be looking into ways we can increase the applicant experience while still gathering this additional data, and yes, we’ll continue partnering with this other company. If we didn’t use their support, then this blog would go dark. Cancel my and Zo"e’s attendance at conferences. No more webchats. Forget about all the long-term strategies we are putting into place because we would only have time afforded to current business needs.

I know quite a bit of people have privacy concerns, and I can assure you there is no rouse or scam going on with our partner company. We give them a name, email address, and phone number, and then send the information they gather directly back to us. They do not resale this information.

And it’s still a very, very human process. I’m reviewing resumes on the way out and reviewing questionnaires on the way in. Once I route a candidate to a “pipe,” business aligned recruiters still perform phone interviews, and the process flows along like usual.

You may ask (as I think AT did, if this questionnaire is so important to your routing purposes, why not automate it off of the Careers Site when applicants submit resumes? Yeah, very good idea. We’ve proposed the same, but this solution won’t be in place for a very long time.

So until then, please keep sending me feedback. You can send it to me directly at gledgard@microsoft.com or post it here on the blog.

Most people on my team are relative “veterans” of Microsoft recruiting, and we’ve seen processes and systems come and go and work and not work. And a few of us have even been on the losing side of some of those trends. We’ve seen it all.

But we certainly believe in our new methodology, and we definitely want to make it work … for our recruiters, for our hiring managers, and definitely for YOU.

Thanks for being patient with us while we work out the bugs. I think until you step inside the beast, you just don’t understand how many wheels and gears make this engine run.

We truly, truly, truly have the best of intentions and want to see the Microsoft recruiting process one day hailed (by YOU, the applicant) as THE most efficient, speedy, and highest class operation on the block.

We’ll get there.

gretchen