02/24/92 HOW MICROSOFT MAKES OFFERS PEOPLE CAN'T REFUSE

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HOW MICROSOFT MAKES OFFERS PEOPLE CAN'T REFUSE

Joe and Cathy Jo Linn were weighing job offers from Microsoft Corp. The jobs looked fine, but it meant moving across the country, uprooting the kids, and leaving an easy lifestyle. They hemmed and hawed and gave the recruiters excuses: They balked at Microsoft's notorious 80-hour weeks. They refused to commute more than a mile from their home. They wanted a big house in their price range. They were in the midst of karate lessons in Virginia. How could they possibly leave?
Easy, said Microsoft recruiter Carrie Tibbetts. She told them they could work flexible hours. She located a suitable house within half a mile of the office and faxed them a picture. She even found them a karate instructor. The Linns now work at Microsoft.
Why all the bother? Explains Tibbetts: ''They're very smart.'' Finding and hiring the best is top priority in Redmond, Wash. It drives the No.1 maker of personal computer software to visit 137 campuses, some of them four times each year. It prompted the review of more than 120,000 resumes last year and face-to-face interviews with 7,400 candidates--to hire 2,000 people. It makes Microsoft pull out the stops for folks like the Linns, two PhDs who were working at a military think tank outside Washington, D.C. Explains Jeff Raikes, a senior vice-president: ''You can't hire bad programmers and get great software.''
HARD SELL. Even Chairman William H. Gates III gets in on the act. Ask him what the most important thing he did last year was and he answers: ''I hired a lot of smart people.'' Then he actually names them. Near the top of his list is James Allchin, the former chief technical officer at Banyan Systems Inc. His knowledge of networking software is critical in his new post as vice-president for advanced systems. ''It took a year to recruit him,'' says Gates with the pride of the happy hunter.
Allchin, 40, knew he was Gates' quarry. He kept deflecting Microsoft's offer, but Gates kept coming back--visiting, calling, flying him in for dinner. Gates finally won him--at a 35% pay cut. ''He convinced me of one thing,'' Allchin says. ''If you want to change the world--and being the silly kind of guy I am, I do--I would have a bigger impact at Microsoft.''
The company relies on hundreds of ''hard-core'' technologists such as Allchin. Microsoft programmers must endure the grueling process of writing lines and lines of computer code. On average, a good programmer produces only 10 lines of bug-free code a day--for a program that may eventually contain upwards of 500,000 lines.
Besides tenacity, the best programmers must have creative problem-solving skills. To spot these talents, Executive Vice-President Steven A. Ballmer came up with a technique that has become legend: seemingly off-the-wall, brain-teaser questions (chart). John Neilson, regional general manager of Microsoft's New York office, recalls his first sampling. He and Ballmer were jogging in Central Park four years ago when Ballmer turned and said: ''How many gas stations do you think there are in the United States?'' Neilson spent 20 minutes puzzling it out. Now he uses the question on job candidates. Explains Ballmer: ''They don't have to get the right answer. But I want to see how they go through the process. If they're good, I make the game harder.''
Ballmer-like questions are just one way of weeding out applicants. Young recruits may be looked over several times on campus before they are flown to Redmond headquarters. There, they spend a day being interviewed by at least four staffers from different parts of the organization. The process is so thorough that an interviewer may pass on details and comments about the candidate to the next interviewer--via electronic mail--before the next session begins.
The system has earned Microsoft a reputation for bagging much of the country's best young technical, marketing, and management talent. ''It's a machine, the way Microsoft is set up in the universities,'' says Brad Silverberg, a Microsoft vice-president.
That approach keeps Redmond flooded with candidates. Someday, these eager youths may see a windfall from Microsoft's stock-option plan, but most accept less than the going rate of pay to sign on. Thomas Dimitri, a 22-year-old Microsoft recruit from the University of Arizona, had offers with bigger salaries from IBM and Compaq Computer Corp. ''The Microsoft name carries a lot of mystique,'' he says. ''Just having that on your resume looks great.''

Kathy Rebello in Redmond, Wash., with Evan I. Schwartz in New York