The first-timers’ guide to interviewing Microsoft professionals

How to prepare to interview a Microsoft professional

Interviewing a potential new hire can be daunting, especially when there are a lot of technical skills involved. If you’re hiring Microsoft professionals for the first time, it pays to do your research.

If you’re not particularly well-informed about the tech stack in question, try and team up with a member of the tech team who understands the platform knowledge and skills needed. But whether you have a tech whizz in your corner or not, it’s helpful to know at least a little about the products your candidates might have worked with, so get to grips with the basics of:

• Dynamics 365 CRM apps (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Field Service): Manages customer-facing processes like customer service, sales, and marketing.
• Dynamics 365 ERP apps (Supply Chain, Finance, Business Management): Handles behind-the-scenes processes like finance, supply chain, inventory, and business operations management.
• Power BI: Transforms raw data into interactive reports and dashboards for business insights.
• Power Apps: Enables users to build low-code or no-code business applications.
• Power Automate: Automates workflows and integrates different apps and services.
• Microsoft Teams: Facilitates business communication, collaboration, and meetings.
• Microsoft SharePoint: Manages documents, intranet sites, and content collaboration.
• Microsoft Azure: Provides cloud computing services for data storage, AI, and business applications.

Then clarify the highest-priority skills and experiences you want to see in a candidate, and sort the must-haves from the nice-to-haves.

Be sure to have a clear outline of the job and its responsibilities, the team structure, what a typical day might look like, and the goals you want the successful candidate to help you achieve with your Microsoft tech stack. This will not just help you choose a candidate that aligns with your business and its needs, but also allows the candidate to understand your expectations.

The interview process

Good interview practice for Microsoft professionals isn’t so different from any other job role. You should be thorough and go into each stage having done your due diligence, while taking care not to drag out the process longer than necessary.

Additional stages like technical tests are unavoidable when screening candidates that need to be adept in certain platforms, but it’s crucial that you don’t make things more complicated and time-consuming than they need to be.

Good Microsoft candidates are in high demand, and you need to move quickly to snap them up before someone else does.

The best interview process for you will, of course, depend on your organization, the role you’re hiring for, and the timescales you’re working to. But a good process for sizing up Microsoft professionals could look something like this.

Stage 1: Screening Call

At this early stage, you’ll want to quickly assess the candidate’s qualifications, communication skills, and enthusiasm before diving deeper into technical prowess at a later stage.

What to ask

1. “Walk me through your experience with [Dynamics 365/Power BI/M365].”

Listen out for details about specific projects they’ve worked on, and what they did.

2. “What Microsoft certifications do you have?”

Make a note of any relevant certifications they have, ask whether they’re working towards any new accreditations, and if they don’t have any, find out what kind of hands-on experience they have that might compensate for it.

3. “Why are you interested in this role?”

This question helps you gauge their passion for the tech and their understanding of your business. Ideally, you want to hear things that reflect their professional experience and highlight their knowledge of how your industry utilizes Microsoft products, like “I love building Power BI dashboards that drive decisions” or “I see you’re in manufacturing—I’ve optimized D365 for supply chain before”.

Stage 2: Technical assessment

At the next stage of the process, you’ll want to find out more about the candidate’s experience and technical knowledge, and validate their hands-on skills with the platform in question.

Your practical test should help you visualize not only the candidate’s skills, but their thought process. While traditional exam-style tests can be used, a real-world, use-case type test can give you a much better idea of how candidates can put their know-how into action to achieve specific business goals.

What to ask

A good practical test for a Power BI candidate might be something like giving them a messy Excel sales dataset and asking them to build a Power BI report showing key metrics.

You can then look at their process and the end result for certain characteristics. Did they clean and transform the data properly before modeling it, for instance? Did they showcase strong DAX skills by writing measures like YTD Sales = TOTALYTD(SUM(Sales[Amount]), ‘Date'[Date])? Did they use visualization best practices to make data digestible and avoid clutter?

If you’re interviewing for a Dynamics 365 Admin position, you could set them a task to look into leads not being assigned correctly and fix any issues.

A task like this would help you determine their knowledge of workflows, business rules, security roles, and team hierarchies.

You could also supplement a technical task by asking specific technical questions that align with your own goals for the position, or common challenges you come across with your Microsoft stack. Think open-ended, outcome-focused questions like “how would you optimize a slow Power BI report?” or “how would you handle a plugin that’s crashing in production?”.

Be sure to align these technical questions with your own tech stack, especially if you have plans to implement new platforms or functionality in the near future. Any good Microsoft candidate should be up to date with new developments and general best practices surrounding topics like governance and security.

Here are a few example questions you can ask a Microsoft candidate to see how plugged in they are to the Business Applications ecosystem.

• How have you used Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Dynamics 365 together in a business setting?
• Can you explain the Dataverse and how it supports integration between Microsoft business applications?
• Have you implemented Power Automate flows or AI-driven insights in your projects?
• How do you use Copilot in Microsoft 365 or Dynamics 365 to improve workflows?
• What are some best practices for governance and compliance in a Microsoft cloud environment?
• How do you secure and manage user access across the Microsoft stack?

Stage 3: Behavioral and cultural fit

Once you’ve determined that a candidate has the right skills to succeed in the role, it’s time to assess their other professional skills—like problem-solving, time management, and adaptability—and find out how they might fit in with your team. 

These so-called soft skills are just as important as their technical expertise, and are often more difficult to train. A brilliant developer who can’t explain things to non-technical team members, for example, will frustrate their colleagues. Making sure they have a good foundation of professional and interpersonal skills will go a long way towards ensuring a successful integration with your team and your processes.

What to ask

Ask questions that give candidates the chance to talk about how they used their skills to address specific situations, and the results their efforts achieved. This is referred to as the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) method and is a particularly useful approach for ascertaining soft skills.

Examples of good STAR method questions include:

• Tell me about a time you solved a complex technical problem
• How do you explain technical concepts to non-technical people?
• Describe a time you disagreed with a stakeholder. How did you handle it?
• How do you stay updated?
• Describe a time you had to troubleshoot a high-impact issue in a Microsoft 365/Dynamics 365 environment.
• Tell me about a project where you had to convince stakeholders to adopt a Microsoft solution.
• Have you ever trained end-users on Power BI/Dynamics 365/Microsoft 365? How did you approach it?

Ask for specific examples of actions, take note of how a candidate describes their process, and find out what the impact on the business was and how they measured it. You could even role play a situation to see how they communicate with stakeholders and approach issues.

Remember, while it’s always good to hear that a candidate achieved a positive result like reducing a report loading time, the situation described doesn’t have to be a big win. It’s often just as valuable to hear about a time when things didn’t go well, so you can see how the candidate handles challenges, stress, and difficult interactions.

Stage 4: Final interview

If they haven’t been involved in the process yet, a final interview is a good chance for leadership figures or CTO to get to know your candidate and ensure strategic alignment with the business before they’re hired.

Leadership execs might want to ask questions like “how would you help our business get more value from Microsoft tools?”, or “what’s one underused feature in Power BI/Dynamics 365 that we should leverage?” to see how well the candidate understands what you want to achieve by bringing them on board.