“Unlike in the conventional hiring process, I had a couple of days left in the program,” Jarvis says. “It was a matching problem of some type that I didn’t realize until later could have been solved with a dynamic programming algorithm,” he recalls.įrom his hotel room that night, he emailed the interviewer and explained his better way to work through the problem. In his first “real” interview during his academy in October, he says he bungled an answer but had the chance to revisit it because of the program’s unusual format. He chose an app that organizes a person’s to-do list and imitated it, then added a few features of his own. He’d done a fair amount of Windows app development on his own, so he was familiar with the platform. As part of the preliminary process, he was asked to recreate an app from the Windows Store. “I function well enough that going into it came with a certain degree of impostor syndrome,” he recalls.Įventually, he decided to apply. He says having Asperger’s syndrome, a type of autism, had been only a background problem at school but began to become more of an impediment in job interviews after he graduated, despite the on-campus career counseling that had been available. When he learned about the Autism Hiring Program, he wasn’t immediately sure it was the right fit. He did a few phone interviews and an in-person interview on his university campus, and “they weren’t particularly bad, but not excitingly good,” he says. Jarvis, who graduated from Purdue University in 2011, had applied at Microsoft many times through campus recruiters and online job listings. “They’re now in a field they want to be in, working on a team and in an environment that values different ways of working and communicating, and they feel supported in that,” Guadagno says. The benefits of the program are evident in the satisfaction of those who have landed jobs through it. The hiring managers also receive training about autism as a culture and within the workplace, which Guadagno says not only helps facilitate better interviews, but also leads to stronger communication within the teams after candidates are hired. The Microsoft Autism Hiring Program spans multiple days that include team projects, informal discussions with managers, mock interviews, coaching and final round interviews. Seeking a job at Microsoft typically involves meeting with multiple managers in back-to-back interviews that can take a full day, a process that can be very stressful. “We’re hiring people with amazing technical skills to come in and work on product teams such as HoloLens.”Īs part of the company’s efforts to promote diversity and inclusion, “different perspectives or styles really help us build richer products that are going to be better for the market,” she says. “There’s an incredible pool of skilled and talented people who also happen to have autism,” says Jen Guadagno, program manager for Inclusive Hiring at Microsoft. The program is now seeking candidates for hiring academies that are held throughout the year, and its success has led to its continued expansion: What began as a pilot program in the spring of 2015 for Washington state candidates is now bringing in applicants from around the United States. In the year and a half since it was first announced, the Microsoft Autism Hiring Program has helped engineers and other tech-minded people with autism spectrum disorder land jobs that are well-suited to their skills through its unique approach to evaluating candidates and supporting them through the interview process. If you ask him what’s so great about the mixed-reality holographic device now, he’ll tell you quite simply: “Everything.” Philip Jarvis on the Microsoft Redmond campus He landed a job as a software engineer for Microsoft HoloLens - a position he says he initially thought was too awesome to even think about pursuing. The computer science grad would describe his accomplishments - and then find himself offering up reasons why they weren’t that impressive.īut his interview last fall was different. He says having Asperger’s syndrome has brought a degree of social anxiety and made it difficult for him to sell himself. In the past, job interviews at various places hadn’t gone very well. He’d been a “Microsoft fanboy” since the first Windows Phone came out in 2010, he explains, and he really wanted to work for the company. Philip Jarvis showed up at Microsoft’s Redmond campus wearing his Microsoft Band and toting his Surface Pro 2 and HTC 8xT Windows Phone.
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