I applied through university. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Mar 2013
Interview
It was surprisingly easy and clean. Had an on campus filtering interview followed by a day of interviews on-site at Seattle which came within a week. The results were communicated back in less than 48 hours. They do coax you to accept the job and push you to make a decision quickly, which I think is reasonable.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Very predictable. Lots of coding questions and the bar raiser being a Dynamic programming question