Microsoft's new R&D Center in Israel (ILDC) is going through a lot of recruiting and PR effort. It's latest PR stunt - The Microsoft Friends Club which is open for "all students, studying for any certified degree in computer science, software engineering, communication engineering or electrical engineering in any academic institution".
To launch this club, Microsoft announced on a series of free rock concerts - for students studying the above mentioned fields and their friends...
Now, I'm not a PR or a recruiting expert, but it seems to me like Microsoft is shooting in the dark with this campaign:
- Unfocused audience - Yes, some of the attendees are going to be engineering students. I guess most won't.... That's hardly close to the "engineering students who are about to graduate and are looking for a job\internship" target audience. Even less if we change the definition to "geeky engineering students" who are the top talents Microsoft should really want on its side...
- Unclear messaging/branding - Because free rock concerts really gives the "We're a cool software company that drives innovation. We're the place you want to be if you want to work on leading edge technology...". At best, it gives a statement of "We have lots of money... if we through it away like that on students just imagine what we do for our own employees".
It's sad that Microsoft's ILDC chose to ignore successful events and case studies done abroad for this purpose and chose to promote itself as if it was a cellphone company...
If anyone over there at ILDC is reading this post, if you really want an effective campaign for recruiting students just learn from the two examples below. Both target a very specific audience which is exactly the type you'd want to recruit as a company, and by sponsoring such event you're getting the right message across: "We're a cool company that values and sponsors new technology and innovation and the people who create it".
1. Microsoft Imagine Cup
The Microsoft Imagine Cup is a worldwide competition for students, held by Microsoft, encouraging students to submit new and innovative projects and compete with other students locally and worldwide. As summarized in the case study:
What: The world’s premier student
technology competition, in which
teams and individuals submit their
projects online or in person for a
chance to compete at the global
finals—like the Olympics of technology—
held in a different country each
year.
Why: To inspire young people
to conceive and build innovative
technology solutions to real-world
challenges.
Who: More than 100,000 university
and high school students from 111
countries are registered for the 2007
Imagine Cup.
How: Teams and individuals can
enter nine categories that include
software design, embedded development,
Web development, short film,
photography, IT, algorithms, and a
programming battle called Project
Hoshimi.
Where: The worldwide finals of the
2007 Imagine Cup will take place in
Seoul, South Korea, in August.
More info:
http://www.imaginecup.com
ILDC can encourage such activity via its campus activities. Sponsor a local Israeli cup, and more...
2. Google Summer of Code
The Google Summer of Code is an annual program, in which Google awards stipends to hundreds of students who successfully complete a requested free software/open-source coding project during the summer.
The program invites students who meet their eligibility criteria to post applications that detail the software-coding project they wish to perform. These applications are then evaluated by the corresponding mentoring organization. Every participating organization must provide mentors for each of the project ideas received, if the organization is of the opinion that the project would benefit them. The mentors then rank the applications and submit the ranked list to Google. Google then decides how many projects each organization gets, and selects the top-n applications for that organization, where n is the number of projects assigned to them.
In the event of a single student being present in the top-n of more than one organization, Google mediates between all the involved organizations and decides who "gets" that student. The slots freed up on the other mentoring organization are passed to the next-best ranked application in that pile.
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Dare has written a post that claims there's an exodus from Google to Microsoft. The post is driven by his own observations and a post entitled Back to Microsoft from Sergey Solanik detailing his departure to Microsoft.
Sergey's post contains some very interesting observations:
So why did I leave?
There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement. There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid. I will not write about these things here because they are immaterial. I did not leave because of them. No company has achieved the status of the perfect workplace, and no one ever will.
I left because Microsoft turned out to be the right place for me.
First, I love multiple aspects of the software development process. I like engineering, but I love the business aspects no less. I can't write code for the sake of the technology alone - I need to know that the code is useful for others, and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work.
Sorry open source fanatics, your world is not for me!
Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them.
And some observations of Google's culture (bolding was done by me):
...
On the other hand, I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there's just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it's a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more.
This is probably fine for free software, but I always laugh when people tell me that Google Docs is viable competition to Microsoft Office. If it is, that is only true for the occasional users who would not buy Office anyway. Google as an organization is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.
The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.
Since I've been an infrastructure person for most of my life, I value reliability far, far more than "coolness", so I could never really learn to love the technical work I was doing at Google.
Dare also quotes Svetlin Nakov that also have some interesting things to say about the Google culture:
"Google interview were not professional. It was like Olympiad in Informatics. Google asked me only about algorithms and data structures, nothing about software technologies and software engineering. It was obvious that they do not care that I had 12 years software engineering experience. They just ignored this. The only think Google wants to know about their candidates are their algorithms and analytical thinking skills. Nothing about technology, nothing about engineering."
"Google employ everybody as junior developer, ignoring the existing experience. It is nice to work in Google if it is your first job, really nice, but if you have 12 years of experience with lots of languages, technologies and platforms, at lots of senior positions, you should expect higher position in Google, right?"
This just demonstrates another cultural problem - Google doesn't hire the right people for the job.
Granted, young, enthusiastic developers, with string academic background (and probably several degrees) can do some cool innovative stuff. These are exactly the type of guys you would want in your R&D department.
But it also the type that tends to loose interest when the research phase ends and the projects has goes to scaling and maintenance phases where you have to deal with stuff like support, maintenance (Google doesn't even provide a roadmap for its products), localization, scalability, ...
The bottom line is, as Dare concluded, is that Google isn't a small startup anymore but it still thinks and acts like it is - in its hiring policies, internal processes and culture.
When measuring it up against other software giants it simply seems to lack...
As Fortune sums it up:
Think about that. Google recently made headlines by bidding almost $5 billion in a government auction of wireless spectrum, even though the company had no plan for using it. Some of its more peculiar products include Google Sky, Google Mars, and Google Ride Finder. It has become a significant investor in alternative-energy projects. Yes, alternative energy. And its founders fret that its risk-taking days are over? Then again, Google's biggest risk may be recreating the magic it enjoyed as a startup- that intangible quality that makes Silicon Valley tick. Paul Buchheit, the former Google engineer who is on to his second startup now, recalls what he loved about Google's early days. "I was always so excited at Google, because I didn't know what would happen next," he says. "Then I knew what would happen next." Predictability is a virtue in the world of big business. It's just not particularly Googley.
Maybe some of us in the industry were writing off Microsoft and crowning Google a little bit too soon...