Recruiting Journeys | Technology: Drew Bermudez ’24, Microsoft

In this series, recent Yale SOM graduates break down the recruiting process that led them to their current roles.

How does the recruiting process work in your field?

Even before I arrived at SOM, I submitted my resume to the Career Development Office (CDO) for feedback so I could get it as perfect as it could be. As soon as I showed up on campus, the CDO started posting job opportunities in Slack; Microsoft was actually the first one I applied to. The cycle was early, but I was in a good position to apply because I had polished my resume in advance.

I went through two rounds of interviews, one screening with a recruiter, and one day-long interview during which I spoke to four or five people. I prepared using the tech club’s recruiting curriculum, including a great repository of questions that helped me understand what to expect during an interview. When I went through the first round of interviews at Microsoft, I learned there were a couple other students applying for product management roles there, and we formed a casing team together. We did practice questions together and tested each other out before we went to the final round of interviews. I got an internship offer from Microsoft, and accepted a full-time offer at the end of summer.

Which SOM classes prepared you for your current role?

I took Kyle Jensen and K. Sudhir’s Large Language Models, which was definitely helpful for working on AI at Microsoft. Innovator was also really useful, because there’s a lot of overlap between product management and entrepreneurship. For example, product management involves focusing on the customer and figuring how to best solve their problems. And especially within a larger company, there’s a lot of pitching the projects you want to work on and trying to convince people that your idea is the best use of time. Those are both skills I honed in Innovator.

How did the SOM network help you in your job search?

When I was doing the case prep with my peers at SOM, we were all recruiting for the same role, and we didn’t know how many slots were available. But everyone was super helpful and focused on making sure we all had the best shot at getting the job. There was no competitiveness, even though you could reasonably see that happening. I don’t think I would have gotten the role without support from my classmates, and the amount of peer knowledge that’s available throughout the recruiting process.

What advice would you give to current students recruiting in tech?

Keeping up with tech news is really important. Tech evolves so quickly that you need to have a pulse on how things are changing over time, especially in product management. I would recommend reading through TechCrunch and the tech section of the Wall Street Journal, and maybe even work on your own tech-adjacent projects. You don’t have to be hyper-technical, but you do need to be interested in the future of technology to be comfortable working in the space.