Microsoft and Hr Policies
Introduction Microsoft has grown from revenue of $197 million and 1442 employees in 1996 to $19 747 million and 31 575 employees in 1999. This growth has seen them evolve and change their human resource philosophies, polices and practices developed at start up in the 1980s. Recruiting Microsoft Corporation was started by former Chief Executive Bill Gates and co-founder Paul Allan. They started the company by recruiting the brightest people they knew from school – their “smart friends” and because it worked, they believed in hiring only extremely intelligent, but not necessarily experienced, new college graduates. Bill Gates believed Microsoft was in the intellectual property business and that the effectiveness of the developers that determines their success. “Take our 20 best people away, and I will tell you that Microsoft will become an unimportant company” was his firm belief. The interview process was also designed to try and find the founders of Microsoft over, and over again. The qualities the founders had is what they tried looking for in their candidates. Develop Motivate Retaining Because these young graduates were so much like the founders it was very easy for the organisation to know what to do to retain therm. The corporate goals were so interlinked to the goals of the employees. Microsoft offered the best coaching and training. Mistakes were taken as a learning curve. Employees were given share options as bonuses and considering the growth of Microsoft in the 1980s to the 1990s, all of them essentially became multi millionaires but continued working for Microsoft as essentially volunteers. Microsoft virtually outsourced their reward policy to the stock exchange. Challenges Considering that Microsoft only wanted the top students from the top schools, supply was soon to run out as other technology companies like Oracle and Google competed for the same graduates. To make matters worse they only concentrated on technical skills
References: Bartlett, C. A. (2001),