Microsoft is doubling down on entry-level talent, even before they graduate university

Getting a job early in one’s career has never been easy, but the 2026 job market has been particularly tough for new grads.

The unemployment rate for recent college graduates was 5.7% in June, per the most recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, well above the 4.1% for all workers and 2.9% for college graduates of all ages that same month. Entry-level job postings were down 35% between 2023 and 2026, according to an analysis from Revelio Labs. Some experts have pointed to AI adoption as one culprit behind employers pumping the brakes on early-career hiring since the technology can perform an increasing number of tasks typically assigned to young professionals.

However, not all companies are backing off from entry-level talent. Over the last few years, Microsoft has revamped its early-career hiring approach, preparing for the ways AI has and will most likely change roles, and how to identify and cultivate young professionals to take on those roles when they enter the workforce. The tech giant has focused on three areas: how it targets and connects with students before they graduate, how it evaluates and hires talent, and how they learn and grow after joining Microsoft.

“Some companies are looking at college grads and early career and see a reason to hire fewer of you. Microsoft is just the opposite,” Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s chief people officer, told a crowd of more than 1,600 early-career Microsoft employees at a gathering specifically for them hosted in Seattle in October. The attendees were members of Microsoft’s Aspire program, a year-long learning and development initiative for eligible workers who joined the company within the last year; it boasted 2,100 global participants this year.

HR Brew sat down with Coleman, and other leaders and employees at Microsoft, to discuss its ongoing investments in early-career talent.

Microsoft’s buyout offers, explained

The week following this event and interviews, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft planned to offer buyouts to 60,000 employees—around one-quarter of its staff—at the vice president level or below. The offers are designed to provide workers who want to leave Microsoft the support and resources to do so, and help participating teams adapt their staff to evolving needs, Coleman wrote in an internal memo to employees.

Hope Pitner, a Microsoft spokesperson, directed HR Brew to several previously-made comments, including those from Coleman and Microsoft’s chief financial officer, Amy Hood, who said in an earnings call in late October that 3,000 or fewer employees are expected to take the most recent buyout offer. While the buyouts are not directly tied to Microsoft’s investment in early career talent, both represent parts of a slate of new talent initiatives the tech giant is experimenting with, including a new voluntary retirement program announced in April.

“There is no one-size-fits-all approach for every team or every employee. These are a few of the ways we’re trying to meet different business needs while continuing to create opportunities for our own people to grow and contribute,” Coleman wrote in her memo to staff.

Early-career talent is seemingly critical to those goals. In her address to employees and interview with HR Brew, Coleman said that Microsoft needs AI native workers because they’re already fluent with AI and can help tenured employees as the company figures out how to reshape the way work gets done.

“Satya and I talk a lot about how we want more of you here. We might need to get rid of more of me’s [senior, tenured employees] because we need to make room for all of your new ideas,” Coleman said, adding that “Every senior leader that we’ll need in 10 years is starting their career somewhere in here today.”

Building campus partnerships before graduation

Microsoft is preparing future employees well before they graduate college. Coleman said the tech giant pulled back from university partnerships earlier this decade for several reasons (pandemic-related campus closures, competition targeting the same schools, etc.), and instead relied on traditional internships and dedicating a few weeks in the autumn to campus recruiting. But roughly two years ago, it began cultivating partnerships again with universities that could help it develop and hire cohorts of talent early.

One recent example is its partnership with Northeastern University. The Boston school is known for its co-op model, where students participate in months-long, full-time programs working for different companies.

Microsoft partnered with the university to create a co-op and educational program. First, students participate in a supplemental academic course during the fall semester. Then, they participate in a six-month, full-time internship program—double the length of Microsoft’s typical internships. While students were originally expected to rotate through different parts of the business, as its interns normally do, business leaders and most students wanted to spend the full duration of the program in one concentration, Renate Norman, who leads global early in profession talent acquisition at Microsoft, said.

So far, 93% of students in the Northeastern program have received offers from Microsoft, either for full-time roles or to participate in another internship, according to Norman.

“For everybody involved, students and the business, the satisfaction was really great, because they realized that three months wasn’t long enough to really get a problem, figure out how you’re going to solve it, and then solve it,” Norman told HR Brew. “Six months gave them more time to get through a full cycle for them to actually demonstrate their ability to learn.”

Microsoft is also ensuring that these partnerships help universities better prepare students to enter the workforce at a time when higher education and its value is scrutinized, so “you don’t come out of school and feel like you are trying in a job market that’s unfamiliar,” Coleman said.

How Microsoft evaluates early-career candidates

The tech giant has reconsidered the skills and traits it wants to see from workers before extending an offer. Candidates are, of course, assessed based on their technical skills, Coleman said, but Microsoft also looks at which soft skills (called “frontier abilities” by Norman) candidates demonstrate. In the past, Microsoft looked for these traits after hiring employees, but now it proactively looks for them, Coleman said.

Some examples of what Microsoft looks for in candidates include how fast they learn, their curiosity, and how they approach teamwork, including collaboration and communication. Norman’s team landed on such skills following conversations with different functions in the business. It then focused on finding a way to identify the top 5% to 15% of talent with those skills.

But it’s not as simple as just asking “yes or no” questions about these traits, Coleman said. Norman’s team looks for such skills in several ways: looking for past experiences like winning hackathons, serving as TAs for a class, or contributing to open source code. They’re also asked to walk through their thought processes, work style, or problem-solving approach when describing real-life projects or tasks they’ve completed.

“We’re trying to find demonstrable proof points, besides just an academic rating,” Norman said.

Norman encourages other TA teams to define the actual skills their companies need, scrutinize how recruiters look for those skills when evaluating talent, and find qualified talent from overlooked places. She warned that companies ignoring these considerations now will fall behind those who haven’t.

“If you’re saying that you don’t want this talent, you’re being very short sighted. Because at some point your talent pipeline is going to go away,” she said.

Developing early-career talent with AI training

Investment in talent doesn’t stop at the door, though. The tech company has emphasized an interest in investing in young talent after they’ve joined.

“I think the biggest opportunity we have is to show investment in developing them for the future,” Norman said. “What’s going to keep them here, and then just viable for whether they stay at Microsoft or not, is how do you keep growing and developing them for what’s needed in the future?”

Microsoft provides employees with more formal L&D opportunities, and has also created learning opportunities that are baked into their day-to-day work.

“The idea that [learning] is one path—like you go to a class, or you go to a school, or you go watch a video—those are all still real, but we also have to help people learn and reskill at work. How do we do that with AI? But also, how do we do that with a lot of human connection?” Coleman said.

Microsoft offers traditional training for AI fluency, but is also targeting AI adoption within workflows. For example, it offers a “Camp AIR” program that takes a whole team and helps them redesign their workflow with AI. In customer service, it deployed a tool that assists employees as they’re troubleshooting problems with customers.

There are a myriad of opportunities available to young professionals at Microsoft, said Kaleb Cole, a software engineer in Microsoft’s specialized clouds org. Cole participated in Microsoft’s internship program in the summer of 2024 as a student at West Virginia Tech, and joined full-time in August 2025 after graduating. Outside of his core role, he’s been able to pursue opportunities including participating in the Aspire program, where he served as a leader and coordinator for a six-week AI accelerator program for new and early-career hires, as well as creating a video series for the Microsoft Developer YouTube channel, which has nearly 700,000 subscribers, showcasing and walking through several free Microsoft AI tools for college students.

“With the speed of AI, you’re able to have much more breadth in your responsibilities. I’m very fortunate to be able to do so and take on other opportunities that increase your knowledge in a different domain that you never even thought of,” Cole said.

Coleman encourages other companies to be curious about what these young workers can bring to the table. Even if the tasks that they perform now are being replaced by AI, if they learn about the company generally by taking opportunities outside their domains and working with other parts of the business, they’ll provide far more value in the long-run than they ever would have staying in a traditional, fixed role.

“We can teach them the enterprise. Bring them to your company and see what sort of mind-blowing things they can do for you,” she said.