• The best interview an ex-Microsoft HR exec has ever seen: She had 'gotten some scoop from people'
• Here's what to do in a job interview, says ex-Microsoft exec with decades of experience

Sabina Nawaz has seen some bad interviews.

Among the former Microsoft HR exec's red flags are candidates who don't arrive on time, haven't researched the organization, and show up dressed inappropriately. She's also seen someone completely unqualified for the job start the interview asking if they'd have to do its basic tasks.

But there are people who do get it right. Early in her time at Microsoft, Nawaz, who was there 15 years before becoming an executive coach, was interviewing for a program management job when a woman just graduating from Smith College came in for an interview.

The candidate had clearly done her homework.

She "had a sense of what it would be like to work in a company of that size," Nawaz says. "She knew the program manager role was somewhat unique to Microsoft at that time and she knew the idiosyncrasies of the role that not everybody understood."

To get this information, the candidate had likely done extensive research. "She had probably worked her network and gotten some scoop from people," Nawaz says. This person had come to the interviewed prepared to engage about what the job could look like and how she could succeed in it.

She also asked relevant questions. Nawaz would pose a work scenario and the candidate would say, "in the scenario, can you give me more details about this?" for example, "or are they going to be doing A or B?" She'd take the time to understand the context before launching into a rundown of how she'd behave.

Doing this meant when she answered "she landed it right for the goals, the objectives, the target audience" and could potentially find this kind of success on the job.

The candidate also showed that she'd considered Microsoft's buyers. "She really could put herself in the shoes of the end customer and then speak to the design of the product," Nawaz says. This kind of thinking could result in a potentially more user-friendly product that could find an even bigger audience.  

"The term emotional intelligence gets thrown around a lot," Nawaz says. "But I would say she seemed to have emotional intelligence in spades."

The bottom line: The candidate really did her due diligence to get to know the role and put herself in its shoes to get a sense of how she'd solve problems.

"She just blew me away," Nawaz says.

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