Microsoft is the wealthiest and most successful organisation around the world. Other companies mostly focus on better manufacturing techniques, innovations, better service and good quality products. Microsoft however focus mainly on human resources perspective and in fact Microsoft is an employee-driven organisation.
How do Bill Gates;
1)Led his team
Bill Gates thinks that the success of an organisation is based on the effectiveness of his team. He values his team and staff and identify the importance of his staff. Mainly most of his team members were just out of college so the way he led his team starts with keeping the atmosphere at work to somewhere familiar to them or gave them a sense of social belonging. Gates are always focused on leading each of them towards their ultimate goals.Apart from that, he encourages his team to do horizontal transfer where the employees will developed themselves by exchanging jobs.
2)Recruited his team
Bill Gates believes that he should be recruiting extremely intelligent staff where intelligent comes before experienced. Bill Gates prefer to hire extremely intelligent people but experience is not necessary. Recruiting his team begins with sourcing people from a high class educational facilities such as graduates from Harvard,Yale, MIT, Carnegie Melon and Stanford. The people from Microsoft that recruits new members will visit any of these University and look for the most brilliant, driven students. Bill Gates does not need the experience that the recruits have but he prefer to have new employees with no experience.
The students who are selected will have to go through an interview session and the interview is not done to test knowledge but to test their ability to solve problem, how their thoughts are processed and their working habits. Some interviews that involve technicality then it focus more on problem solving methods where the interviewers ail give the interviewee some problem scenarios. Some unexpected question will also be ask to the candidates to test their creative problem-solving skills.
Examples of the Interviewer Questions;
1) How many times does the person use the word 'the' in a day?
2) Describe the perfect Television Remote Control.
In the interviews, the interviewees are pushed to their limits where if they survived the interviews session then they will manage in the Microsoft working environment. The importance of hiring the right people is in the 'n minus 1' strategy in Microsoft which means less people are employed than they are required. Bill Gates don't only just hire people to fill a position but he mainly focused on recruiting the right team members.
In my point of view, the way Gates led his team is very effective as he understand the importance of his members. Gates not only value his staff but also keeping them comfortable at work. Plus Gates encourages his members to always try to achieve their optimum goals. The way Bill Gates led his team is in order although he cultivated the ideas of exchanging roles in the their workplace and learn a new things for knowledge. Recruiting members in Microsoft does not require much experience in a particular industry but the intelligence in solving problems and how your mind processed to come out with different ideas and ways in problem solving.
References:
"Human Resources Management." Article Base. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Sept. 2013.
