Microsoft plans to go beyond the tier-I cities to look for talent for its research work at Indian Development Centres (MSIDC) in Hyderabad and Bangalore.

The company would recruit 300 engineers from 60 campuses it has identified in India for the financial year 2011-12 (July-June) as against 40 odd colleges last year, according to Mr S. Somasegar, Senior Vice-President (Developer division) of Microsoft Corporation.

“We are going to smaller cities such as Allahabad, Ranchi, Kanpur and Guwahati this year. We are going to make this an annual event. We will add more and more colleges to the list. There is a lot of talent in smaller cities,” he told Business Line .

MSIDC, which started work 13 years ago with about two dozen people, employs 1,600 people. “About 60 per cent of these were hired from Indian colleges. And 30 per cent of them hold senior positions outside India,” he said.

“Of the 60 colleges we will go this year, 10 are exclusively for recruitment for the Redmond centre. Students could opt for India positions, though. This is like a pilot this year. After studying the results, we will scale this up in the subsequent years,” Mr Somasegar said.

He said the company had prepared a programme to help these pre-final year students transition to a full-time employee. “We have a 17-day LEAP (Learning Engineering Accelerated Programme) to help college hires initiate themselves into the company,” he said.

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