New Microsoft Careers Site: Now with your input!

Posted Aug 4 2009 3:24 PM by the JobsBloggers

LisaYou may be wondering where Gretchen, Angela and I have been the last few months. We know it's been awfully quiet around here.

Well, we’ve been immersed with a few large recruiting projects that we can proudly say have successfully shipped!  One of the projects is Microsoft’s new global careers site.

Microsoft CareersPeople from any global location can search for jobs at any Microsoft location worldwide ... all from one site.    

The new carers site will allow you to search for jobs within the 100 countries where we have Microsoft offices. You can save RSS feeds for new job postings. 

By creating an account, you can save jobs in your job cart over multiple sessions, store your resumes for future use, and view past job applications …  that’s right, you can store up to 3 resumes now. :)  Now when you copy and paste your resume, you’ll see that the HTML formatting remains intact for easier read. 

Get connectedSo far, we've launched new websites for the US and the UK, and we're launching new careers website for all other countries in the next few months. On each country's site, you can Find Your Fit, by learning about our different professions and product areas and hone down on where your passion lies. 

You can also meet our businesses and dive into our office locations. No black holes here. :)

And you can even stay up to date with the latest posts from JobsBlog and Microspotting. I think I’ll let you check out all the rest firsthand yourself. 

ERE recently featured an article about our new site. It dives further into the project, features and functionality that are now offered when searching for jobs at Microsoft. 

Definitely check out the careers site, create a new profile, and search and apply for jobs. You’ll see a lot of your ideas and feedback have already been incorporated into the site. It's still a work in progress - so we’d love to hear from you about what you think. Feel free to comment below and also take advantage of our ‘Provide feedback’ link at the top of the site.

Lisa
 

29 Comments

  • jobsblog said:

    Hi everybody - Gretchen here. I am one of the "editors" of our careers website.(I'm also the founder of JobsBlog.) If you've read JobsBlog for much time, you know how passionate I've been about the careers website. In fact, I first founded JobsBlog 5+ years ago because I wanted to provide info that our old careers website couldn't. I've listened and talked to many of you over the last few years, so we're tried to design the new site with your feedback in mind. And my work is never done so it's never too late to chime in!

    I'll respond to each piece of feedback here in the comments ... post away! :)

    -gretchen

  • Emanuel said:

    Hello! Thank you very much for this site. I like it. It was hard for you to done it? Thanks!

    regards,

    Emanuel

  • Brent Schmidt said:

    Hi JobBloggers, was wondering if you had any information on the upcoming hiring process for the new Microsoft store in Scottsdale, AZ. I'd love to be a part of the opening crew for the flagship store as it'd be a perfect fit for me. Thanks.

    -Brent S.

  • gretchen said:

    Brent - I've heard from the MS Stores' recruiting team that they have not announced job opening dates for each store yet or exactly how those jobs will be posted. As soon as we hear more info, we'll update it here, too.

  • me :) said:

    just a question ?? are you still looking for translators for the pages ??

    if so .. i might be intrested for the dutch part :) feel free to email me..

    isabelle

  • Bernie Goulet said:

    Great Job!

    I just got back from visiting the new site and its fantastic! You might recall I sent a question/comment about the issue of international job transparency. Little did I know you were all ready all over it! Congratulations on a job VERY well done!

    Regards, Bernie

  • Scott Griffiths said:

    Hi - I've entered my resume and job search specs under a signed in profile using my Microsoft Live ID. Unfortunately when I come back none of the opportunities I've successfully applied for, nor searches I've saved are being saved under my profile (e.g. resume & job search queries).

    How are candidates supposed to see the status of our previous successful applications without this information? Additionally you might want to set up cookies so that when we choose USA under default country we don't have to do that on a daily basis (given your limit of 10 apps per day).

    The lack of tracking is especially concerning given that the system is sending confirmation e-mails of what we've applied for following our submissions, but it begs the question are our applications actually getting to the recruiters that need it inside of Microsoft.

    Can someone please reply back about this.

  • jobsblog said:

    Isabelle - thank you! I'll let our team know you are interested if they are in need of translators.

    Bernie - Thanks! Glad you like the site!

    Scott - I'm checking with our team to figure out what's going on with your profile and saved resumes and searches. I’ll respond back here, but the team may need to contact you directly to troubleshoot. Thanks for letting me know!

    Gretchen

  • Ron said:

    A neighbor of mine just told me that Microsoft was placing a software development center here in Utah. I immediately began searching for information online and came across this posting. I think it is a great post chalked full of pertinent information for all. Thanks for putting so much work into this!

  • gretchen said:

    Scott - I just emailed you to get more info about the bug you found.

    Ron - Thanks! And as soon as we get more info on the Utah Development Center, we'll post it here, too. We've been getting a lot of questions about it. :)

    Gretchen

  • Jacquie said:

    Hi Gretchen! Can you point me to the job board or job postings from Microsoft Studios? Not GAME Studios types, but the video/camera operator/post-production/soundstage related types? If they exist? Thanks so much!

  • Ashic said:

    If we apply to a few jobs and check the "Jobs Applied For" section, we get a list of jobs we've applied for. Unfortunately, there's no hyperlink from that section to the actual job advertisement. As a result, finding a detailed description of a job we applied for is difficult, sometimes impossible. For instance, a job I applied for has the title "SDE". How am I supposed to find that specific job one week from now?

  • jobsblog said:

    Hi Jacquie - I checked with the recruiter for MS Studios, and she said MS Studios is a small group that only has a few openings a year. She suggested to set up a saved search for the key words: Executive Productions, Studios Facility Operations, Microsoft Studios, and Corporate Marketing Group. You could also set up a dropdown (non keyword) search for Division --> Marketing and Job Category --> Software Engineering: Content Publishing and Software Engineering: Creative.

    Ashic - Thanks for the suggestion!

  • Jobs said:

    nice site! I can see a lot of people coming here during the recession!

  • Denise said:

    Gretchen,

    I do not see anywhere on the site to save your information. When I try to go to another page, I get an error message saying I need to save it. Please help.

  • jobsblog said:

    Hi Denise - This is a problem some people are having depending on their configurations, and our support team should be able to help you troubleshoot. If you click "contact us" at the bottom of any page on the careers site, you can get in touch with Support to get it resolved asap.

  • Ricardo said:

    Hi Lisa,

    As I was creating my resume in the new career's website, I encountered an error, it seems minimal but I want to give you a heads up. After I clicked Apply for one of the Senior SDE positions (Job ID: 256570) and entered my name, phone and address, I couldn't select the State (TX in my case) for my address from the drop down list, instead there was an error message displayed in the dropdown list.

    I remember visiting the career's website a long time ago and the new site is definitely a big improvement, congrats!

  • jobsblog said:

    Hi Ricardo - Thanks for the heads-up! We'll look into it!

    Gretchen

  • Tina Cooper said:

    Hello,

    I was wondering if someone could please tell me how to successfully copy and paste a resume into Microsoft's resume builder. Every time I copy and paste (and I have tried a variety of ways, i.e., all at once, in bits, etc.), and it always gets distorted (i.e., the font size changes, the bullets disappear, etc.). I also have tried to type it directly into the resume builder, but that only allows 500 characters per job description. That's only four lines (not nearly enough to describe last 9 years at present company!). Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

  • Tina said:

    Hi,

    It's Tina again with another issue. Now I've finally gotten the resume in the resume builder, but it says I need to keep it under 50K characters. I've had to delete all but a small amount of information, and it keeps telling me I've got to keep it under 50K characters! But it won't tell me how many I have. Very frustrating! Thanks for any help.

  • jobsblog said:

    Tina - it sounds like you might be encountering a bug. If you click "contact us" at the bottom of any page on the careers site, you can get in touch with Support to report it and get it resolved asap.

  • Roy (GC PM) said:

    "...it keeps telling me I've got to keep it under 50K characters! But it won't tell me how many I have. Very frustrating! Thanks for any help..."

    Tina - My name is Roy and I am the PM responsible for the Career site. first, thank you for actively sharing your experiences with us.

    I've logged your first issue (resume style getting changed) as well as the character limit issue. I fully agree that it would be more usable if our users had a visual cue letting you know how many characters remained when there is a limit. We will discuss on our side as a team and make plans to improve this experience in a future release.

  • Jerome said:

    I'm glad I found this thread! I didn't realize that I could paste in the full text of my resume. I was pulling my hair out about the dismal capabilities of the resume builder on the site (500 characters for a job description - really??). The fully formatted resume options is waaay more useful (and an improvement over the old site for sure).

    Anyway, I have a bug to report and a question. Firstly the bug - when I go back to edit the formatted resume I see that some spaces have been removed, so that two adjacent words get combined into one. It happened in 3 places. The only reason I noticed it is that it happened to my name (right at the top of the resume) so then I scanned through it and found the other occurrences. The spaces are not in the source Word doc and only appeared after saving and then editing. After fixing all the missing spaces and saving the issue hasn't reoccurred.

    And now the question. I have submitted my very minimal resume (from the limited resume builder) to a number of positions, but now that I've got a proper resume stored I would like to resumbit the nice one to the positions I applied to before. Is there a way to do this?

    Oh, and I second the request to have a link to the descriptions of the jobs I've applied to. It's nearly impossible to get back to the listings by searching.

    Thanks!

    - Jerome

  • mark said:

    Great post! I also can't seem to get the cut and paste to work properly. Inexplicably certain areas of text will bold face; highlighting the sections and attempting to remove it do not work even though the "B" button on the command line will highlight. Initially I went through and deleted/retyped affected sections to get it right...today I went in to apply a small edit and when saved the whole doc was thrown off again. I am pasting directly from MS Word 2007; shouldn't that work? Nothing extravagant in terms of formatting.

  • Prakash said:

    Hi, How to create Microsoft Careers account?

  • admin said:

    Prakash - Our Careers page utilizes Windows Live for accounts. When you visit the Microsoft Careers site, there is an option to "sign in" in the upper right corner of the page. This will take you to a Windows Live sign in page, either use your existing login information or create a new account. <Ashley>

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