So what is my actual job, you ask?

This is one of the things I like about Microsoft. It pretty much changes every year. No opportunity for stagnation around here! This year, I am going to learn a ton and do a little travel.

So as you may know, my role last year involved 2 things/teams:

1) prospect identification and engagement for marketing roles across Microsoft US. My team hit 150% of goal. Whee!\

2) US focused competitive intelligence and programs. This means that we generated leads for our recruiters and shared competitive info on our talent competitors. We also managed programs around things like hiring Microsoft alumni.

Well, it was fun, but... on to new things.

I have supported the marketing space since I started at Microsoft in 1999.It's kind of like the universe knew that if I got to ten years just focused on the same function, something bad was going to happen. I have LOVED supporting marketing and all the people I've gotten to work with. I get marketing. It's been fun, but I totally feel like I needed to focus on something new. My learning curve around marketing with respect to my role kind of petered out a while ago. And I have been asking to hand off the marketing work for a while. Guess it turns out that when your team goes well above and beyond goal, hand-offs are easier. So the marketing piece I own no longer (thanks Lisa!). I have no doubt that it will continue to be productive and fuel our marketing pipeline in the US for years to come.

As for the second part, well, I am keeping it....kind of. We will still be managing some programs for the US. One I am excited about is figuring out how we hire across the company for people earlier in their career (a few years out of undergrad). I love those "we haven't figured out how to do this yet" projects. The bulk of our work in the research space, though, will be similar to what we did last year except for one major thing. This year, we are all about international dev centers; specifically Ireland, Denmark, Israel, China, India and Boston.  I can't tell you how excited I am about this. Our job is to help our dev center recruiting teams do more and better by informing their candidate generation strategies through competitive intelligence. What does that mean? That we will be providing them information on who they should go after, when and where; providing them with leads, data, e-mail campaign support, training etc. So you'll have to excuse me a little bit if I gush over my job because I am so down with this kind of work, you don't even know. And it's all greenfields stuff. Gotta love building a practice from scratch. See why I spent so much time writing my business plan (and have been getting teased about the fact that it's 25 pages long...hey, I'm complete if nothing else).

I'm also fortunate to have some great work partners, especially Declan in Ireland, in addition to the folks that report to me. He's our conduit to the development centers and, as you can see, he has his own blog. Hmm, perhaps there will be some cross-posting activity.

So you may be wondering if you should expect any changes on my blog. And I'll tell you that nothing is being taken away. I'm still a US-based employee, I am still in staffing and I am still here to represent Microsoft broadly. One of the partner teams in my organization will still have some US focus and I am ALWAYS happy to get a resume into the right hands regardless of where those hands happen to sit (do hands sit? Yes, I think they do).

The additional content that I plan to be sharing is around my experience supporting the international space. So for my regular US audience, you can expect to hear about what I have got going on (some of which is still US program focused). For the international audience, I think you'll start to see opportunities to engage our dev center staffing teams. So seriously, no take-aways. If anything, just additional global goodness.

So this is what I have going on. And if you have any questions about our international recruiting (specific recruiting internationally for dev centers), flip 'em my way and we'll get Declan to hop online and answer them.

See why I am dorky for my job?