{"id":10919,"date":"2018-11-05T12:48:04","date_gmt":"2018-11-05T20:48:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=10919"},"modified":"2023-06-15T15:46:24","modified_gmt":"2023-06-15T22:46:24","slug":"transforming-recruiting-inside-microsoft-with-co-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/transforming-recruiting-inside-microsoft-with-co-development\/","title":{"rendered":"Transforming recruiting inside Microsoft with co-development"},"content":{"rendered":"
This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Creating a development culture that meets business goals and fulfills customer needs can be difficult in an ever-changing marketplace. Microsoft combined development teams and modern engineering practices to co-develop a product that could both be sold to customers and meet the internal business needs of Microsoft. Co-development practices created new ways to share business knowledge and drive digital transformation within the organization, which led to a more useful and full-featured product.<\/p>\n
At Microsoft Digital, we\u2019re continually looking for better ways to support our organization. Microsoft Human Resources wanted to improve their recruiting process by revising the tools they used to recruit and hire new talent.<\/p>\n
After considering several internal and external solutions, they decided to team with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract product group. The goal was to co-develop a product that could serve two purposes: Microsoft could use Attract for their own internal processes, and the Attract product group could release a full-featured, enterprise-ready product to their customers.<\/p>\n
The co-development effort involved development teams from both Human Resources (HR) IT and Attract product groups. HR was able to personalize and integrate Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract into their recruiting platform, thereby significantly improving the recruiting experience. The Attract team was able to accelerate their development process, and both groups were able to work more effectively and improve their productivity.<\/p>\n
The biggest outcome, however, was the fostering of a new co-development culture at Microsoft. We\u2019re using new ways to share business knowledge and work more co-operatively within our organization. Attract is a more useful and full-featured product because of the co-development effort, and co-development is gaining momentum at Microsoft.<\/p>\n
Microsoft employs over 121,000 people worldwide. In the 2017 fiscal year, Microsoft had over 7 million visits to the Careers section of our website, with over 1 million applications submitted. The combination of our applicant system and the work of more than 1,000 Microsoft recruiters and 15,000 hiring managers resulted in 1 million potential employees added to our candidate tracking system. From those 1 million applications, 37,000 candidates went on to the interview process, and 22,000 of those had a job offer extended to them.<\/p>\n
As a large organization, hiring employees at Microsoft includes several moving parts. The start-to-finish recruiting journey at Microsoft involves many more people than just the recruiters and hiring managers. At Microsoft, we maintain a high standard for compliance, privacy, and data protection for our applicants and the recruiting processes. To support our teams, we need to plan for the required positions, source talent to fill those positions, assess the talent pool, and hire the most suitable candidates.<\/p>\n Our end-to-end recruiting system has undergone several iterations over time. A recent system assessment revealed that we needed to update our recruiting toolset to provide the best recruiting experience for our incoming talent, and the best tools for our internal employees involved in the recruiting process. We identified several issues with our existing systems that we wanted to improve:<\/p>\n With a clear indication that we needed to transform the recruiting process, we recognized that our recruiting toolset needed updating as well. Our Human Resource Global Talent Acquisition team began the process of finding a solution that would solve our current issues and prepare us for future growth.<\/p>\n The first thing we did was put together a comprehensive list of recruiting toolset needs and requirements. We assessed the available tools in the marketplace through a request for proposal (RFP) process, and compared the feature set of these tools with our needs. Several points stood out:<\/p>\n Given these considerations and the lack of success in finding a comprehensive toolset, we began to consider other options, including:<\/p>\n After reviewing possible solutions, a new idea surfaced that would send our Human Resources IT development teams in an entirely new direction.<\/p>\n HR IT reached out to the Dynamics 365 product group to see if their two groups could work together to develop a Dynamics 365 product that satisfied the internal needs of Microsoft, but could be sold on the marketplace as a Microsoft product as well. As it turned out, the Dynamics 365 team was already working on a product that fulfilled some of the recruitment toolset requirements\u2014Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract.<\/p>\n Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract was being designed to transform the talent acquisition process by connecting all of the involved parties and unifying all the recruiting process pipelines. In addition, it would upgrade the candidate experience through an improved interface and transparency into the recruitment process. The Attract design would also ensure compliance and extensibility, simplify interview scheduling, and accelerate offer acceptance, all gaps that Microsoft was trying to fill. While Attract wasn\u2019t a complete solution to all of our recruiting needs, it was a good start, and a product partnership that we knew we could foster and build.<\/p>\n When our HR IT department met with the Attract product group, the idea of a mutually beneficial relationship was beginning to form. The product group shared their roadmap for the soon-to-be-released Attract product and where they envisioned it going. Attract was a relatively small player in the marketplace, and growth was high on the list of priorities. The HR IT representatives recognized the internal possibilities for Attract, and the opportunity they had to contribute to the development and success of the product.<\/p>\n Both HR IT and the Attract teams identified several benefits of a partnership:<\/p>\n With the high-level benefits apparent to both sides of the partnership, management began working toward creating a relationship between the two groups. The partnership was discussed as part of a larger review of HR and IT processes, and both teams were given approval to create the partnership in what would be one of the first big internal co-development projects at Microsoft.<\/p>\n The plan for partnership was considered a co-development effort by both sides. HR IT would provide multiple development sprint teams to the Attract team to help with product development. And while the HR IT sprint teams would integrate directly into the Attract team, they would still have the freedom to develop custom modules for internal use only at Microsoft. For example, if a feature or requirement didn\u2019t fit into the Attract roadmap, the HR IT development team would develop their own Microsoft-specific extensions to meet their need.<\/p>\n The HR IT and Attract teams began integrating their development teams, which was the beginning the co-development process. HR IT contributed several sprint teams, increasing the number of developers working on Attract.<\/p>\n While the HR IT sprint teams worked alongside the Attract teams using the same tools and Microsoft Visual Studio Online codebase, they had not just one, but two goals:<\/p>\n As the HR IT and Attract development teams continue to work together, the development process on both sides is continually being refined and evolve. Generally, the integrated HR IT developers find that they are working approximately 80 percent on public release features and 20 percent on Microsoft-specific extensions or modifications to the code. This split makes the development process unique, because the teams are fully integrated, even though the work goals sometimes are not.<\/p>\n The teams have separate backlogs set up for public releases and Microsoft-only features, but both sides are continually examining their own business processes in light of what\u2019s happening in both development streams. The process for determining the destination for a feature request is similar to the following high-level steps:<\/p>\n This process helps the Attract team identify places where they can modify their product roadmap to better serve their customers while also helping Microsoft HR identify areas where they might be using outdated processes or methods. This helps to inform Microsoft HR processes and keep them current.<\/p>\n The co-development process has provided learning experiences for both the HR IT and Attract development teams. Both development teams were working in different environments prior to the co-development effort, and both teams brought unique skill sets to the co-development team. One of the biggest impacts of the new co-development team format was the different perspectives each team brought to the combined effort. For example:<\/p>\n A co-development effort at the scale of Attract had never been attempted at between two such groups at Microsoft. The teams had to learn along the way, adopting and adapting processes and communication methods to fit the new mode of development. The process was not without challenges:<\/p>\n The co-development project has initiated a culture change at Microsoft. It now affects how we look at developing our other products, how our internal teams communicate and cooperate, and how we examine our business practices and processes.<\/p>\n The HR IT sprint teams learned what it was like to be part of a team creating a product that is released to and used by millions of people. They took those experiences back to their internal IT organization and used them to drive transformation in internal processes. Executives and managers from both organizations have been working together with great success, which has paved the way for potential co-development efforts with other business groups and even external partners.<\/p>\n At Microsoft Digital, we\u2019re working at creating a culture of building tools for Microsoft that we can share with our customers, and this co-development effort has been a big part of that. It also provides our internal development teams with a different mode of thinking: if we\u2019re designing with other customers in mind, we\u2019re less likely to create shortcuts or compromise common business practices to get an application or process to fit a Microsoft business practice that itself might need to be examined and changed.<\/p>\n In addition to the co-development benefits previously mentioned, there have been many other positive changes for HR IT, the Attract team, and Microsoft in general:<\/p>\n To create a more efficient co-development environment, we\u2019ve recognized and adopted some best practices that help us:<\/p>\n The co-development effort for Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract has helped us learn more about what it really means to contribute to a product as an entire organization. We feel like we\u2019ve just begun to scratch the surface of what Attract can do for Microsoft, and what co-development can do for product engineering in our organization. We\u2019re currently using the Offer Management module from Attract at Microsoft, with plans to branch into other areas in the near future.<\/p>\n We\u2019re also excited about encouraging the culture of co-development at Microsoft. We want to extend it to other development teams, projects, and larger sections of our organization. We believe that what we\u2019ve done with co-development and Attract can be a roadmap to success for other areas of our organization as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft. Creating a development culture that meets business goals and fulfills customer needs can be difficult in an ever-changing marketplace. Microsoft combined development teams and modern engineering practices to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":10921,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_hide_featured_on_single":false,"_show_featured_caption_on_single":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[674],"class_list":["post-10919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","m-blog-post"],"yoast_head":"\nAssessing the state of recruiting tools at Microsoft<\/h2>\n
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Finding the right tools<\/h3>\n
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Considering other options<\/h3>\n
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Considering another option: Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract<\/h3>\n
Exploring co-development<\/h2>\n
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Discovering and embracing co-development<\/h3>\n
One product, two development streams<\/h4>\n
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Balancing feature inclusion and development streams<\/h5>\n
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Determining development streams<\/h5>\n
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Learning from co-development and modern engineering practices<\/h3>\n
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Addressing challenges<\/h3>\n
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Realizing the culture change of co-development<\/h2>\n
Benefits<\/h2>\n
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Best practices<\/h2>\n
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Going forward<\/h2>\n