My last series of postings (see the original articles here) were written to help people better prepare for their interview day at Microsoft. One of the comments we received asked how an interview for a position outside of our core-tech roles may be different.

Since I am primarily a technical recruiter, I decided to sit down with one of my fellow Staffing Consultants, Theresa Larson, who recruits for the finance, sales and marketing teams within the Microsoft Business Division (MBD).

As we were discussing the differences between the interviews – it seemed the main difference was the absence of technical questions, such as the need to code on the whiteboard. In this posting you’ll get a sense of what types of questions you may encounter. For those of you interviewing for one of our core-tech roles, (SDE, SDET, PM, etc.), you are also asked these types of questions, so this could be helpful for you as well.

Sample Questions
Here are some questions we often see asked in our sales, marketing and finance roles within MBD. Note that some of these questions could be asked for many roles within the company and should give you some idea of what to expect and how to prepare.

Sales
It’s common to receive a business case scenario, i.e., how would you pitch a client knowing the problem they’re dealing with. They’ll give you some information about the client, and the problem – and some information about the product. Even so – be sure to research the product ahead of time so you can offer the best solution in these cases.

Be prepared to talk about prior wins. Think about times you’ve had a difficult situation/challenge with a customer, i.e., budget constraints, you’re going against a competitor – how did you win the customer? How did you gather the information to better position your product vs. the competitor?

Finance
Most of the roles within MBD finance are strategy focused and partner with the business on pricing, go to market plans, competitive research, etc. Some of the questions asked could be: How would you create a finance model? Describe to me your strategy experience? How do you go about setting the financial strategy for product launches?

Marketing
Have you ever heard, “It’s all in the details?” For marketing questions, and any interview question, be prepared to get in to the details. Here’s a sample question and how an interviewer may drill down to get the details:

What was your involvement with the go to market strategy for a product?

• Who did you work with – i.e., finance?
• How did you influence the strategy?
• How big of a launch/how many markets?
• Why were the markets chosen?
• How will it be sold?
• What kind of collateral was created?
• Launch results?

I hope that you find these sample questions helpful. A big thanks to Theresa for her time!

-Ryan