Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Microsoft with 3.2 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 64% positive. To compare, the company-average is 66.3% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 29 days to get hired, when considering 1,705 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Microsoft overall takes an average of 30 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Microsoft as a Software Engineer according to 1,705 Glassdoor interviews include:
One on one interview: 27%
Phone interview: 23%
Skills test: 15%
Presentation: 11%
Background check: 6%
Personality test: 5%
Group panel interview: 5%
IQ intelligence test: 4%
Drug test: 3%
Other: 2%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Microsoft (Hyderābād) in Aug 2015
Interview
There were rounds.Round zero was an online coding test with 2 questions First round was Group fly after resume shortlisting. Rest three were technical interviews. The last round also had some HR questions asked. Most of the questions were asked from DSA and operating systems. The entire process was over in one day.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Round 1(Group fly): Write a program to check whether a given sentence is Word palindrome or not. First word and last words should be same and so on. For example, "Leaf is leaf" is a word palindrome. "Leaf is a leaf" is not.
Round 2: Write a program to find the median of two sorted arrays of size m and n. If the number of elements are odd, output single median, otherwise output average of the two medians.
Round 3: I was asked to implement an LRU cache. It should have O(1) insertion, deletion and updation and accesing an elememt in cache should also be O(1) time.
I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft (Melbourne)
Interview
After submitting an online application, I received a HackerRank assessment after passing the resume screening stage, then I was rejected after completing the assessment and did not proceed to further interview rounds.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The assessment consisted of two LeetCode-medium-level coding questions to be completed within 75 minutes.
45 mins technical interview with a member of their San fran team. Very relaxed and informal but questions were focused and lots of follow ups. Easy to schedule as was over video conferencing platform
Straightforward technical loop overall, with strong interviewers at every stage. I genuinely enjoyed the in-depth conversations around technical challenges and algorithmic problem-solving — the entire process felt well-structured and genuinely engaging.