IvanJo answers MIT/Sloan student's questions. Talks to Carnegie Mellon prospects!

Ivan Joseph (Chicago GSB MBA) - the same ping-pong guy who put his job underfire 1 wk after joining our team by defeating HardeepW our General Manager at the Ping Pong Tournament in Rnd 1 (Massacre would be a better word I hear - but hey English is not my first language so I will go with defeating) was giving his insights to a Sloan student about the Microsoft hiring process.

If you know IvanJo - you'd know you should take his advice with a grain of salt. If you know him even better - you'd add some pepper, garam masala and other fancy multicolor indian spices to boot , but seriously he has some good pointers here.Mentoring students almost on a daily basis - I get the qn of how much of the reading an interviewee does can be used in an interview (though not asked in so many words).

Ivan's response to that is spot-on. "There's so much material out there that it isn't worth stressing about. I haven't read even 1% of the stuff that is written about Microsoft. So the chances are pretty high that whatever you read, your interviewers won't have read- so use that as fodder to ask questions of the interviewers."

While on IvanJo - without much arm-twisting - he was kind enough to take some questions through a concall with a gang of my Tepper students who have been selected to come to Redmond for 2nd rnd interviews (7 of them so far for marketing) end of next wk. The students are preparing on what qns to ask him. Thanx for taking the time IvanJo - appreciate it.