I applied through college or university. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Cisco (New York, NY)
Interview
Their interview process is long and requires. Lot of work. The company recruiters I worked with were nice but very disorganised. The position I applied for was listed for the San Jose location. When a recruiter called, they told me there were no positions available there, so I said I wasn't interested in relocating. I got a call the next day saying they did have openings in San Jose, so I agreed to go through the interview process. This involved:
-a phone call from a recruiter
-a first-round phone interview with a manager
-preparing a one-page technical document and one non-technical slide to respond to a scenario they gave me.
-one half-hour "non-technical" manager interview
-one hour technical interview with two technical managers
Interviews were both conducted via Webex.
The scenario they gave me required a lot of research on my part. The interviews went really well, they all seemed confident I would get the job. The interviewers did not ask about the scenario I had been given or the documents I had prepared, those were uploaded to my candidate profile.
The interviewers encouraged me to start learning everything I could to obtain my CCNA certification, because they were sure I would get the position and your first few weeks at Cisco are like "trying to drink from a firehouse" because of all the new information.
The interview process took about a month because they had to keep rescheduling interviews due to the managers' busy schedule.
After my interviews, the manager asked me to select my location preference from a list. San Jose was not on that list. I responded to the email by saying "I was told San Jose was an option, is that still available?" To which he responded "yes just confirming San Jose is still your preference." That was strange.
I was then told I would hear back within a few weeks. After about five weeks I tried getting a hold of my recruiter and didn't hear back for a while. After trying harder to get in contact with him, I was told I was not selected.
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Cisco in Jan 2015
Interview
Interview process consisted of a 15 minute phone screen (easy questions about work background, college studies, etc.). This was followed by a phone interview with a manager. This was technical. It was moderately difficult. The next round, I was given a technical issue that a customer was experiencing, and I had to create a one slide powerpoint presentation (nontechnical) to present to a manager, in addition to a technical email that had to be less than one page. You don't actually have to present it, it just has to be sent to an email address. The question itself wasn't difficult. It can be found easily on the Cisco support site. They simply expect you to be able to take the information and present it in an understandable fashion to both nontechnical and technical users.
As part of this 3rd round of interviews, I also had a 1 hour interview with a current Customer Support Engineer and a Technical lead. This was very similar to the 2nd interview, except it had more behavioral questions (how would you handle an angry customer, etc.)
The final step in the interview process is a 30 minute interview with a manager. This was completely nontechnical. He asked questions like "Where do you see yourself in 5 years," strengths, weaknesses, etc. This was very different from any of the others.
Within 4 hours, I had a notice that the company wanted to run a background check on me, and then an offer the next day.
The overall interview process was good, but my recommendation would be for Cisco to stop outsourcing the scheduling. I was having to deal with Accenture employees, who then had to communicate with the Cisco employees, and then the Accenture employees would contact me (sometimes). I had two interviews that were moved without notifying me. One of these, I didn't know had been moved until 30 minutes after when it was originally scheduled.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you approach changing your teammates perception of you, if you had gained a reputation for being an unproductive team member
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Cisco (Phoenix, AZ)
Interview
I had an introductory interview with them, about an hour long just to get to know me and talk about my resume. That was the easy part.
The next step was a two-pronged interview over Skype. The first interview was with a CSE team manager. Pretty easy, just talking about how compatible your work style was with the team's style. It was friendly and informative and very casual. It was about 45 minutes.
The second was an interview with two current/past CSE's. This was not advertised to me as a technical interview but it became one very quickly. For the first half hour, it contained basic questions about where my industry strength and weaknesses were: what I had been trained to do, what I hadn't, how much I knew about their company, ect. At the half hour mark, the second CSE took over and began drilling me with code samples asking me "What does this do? What does that do?"
It took my by surprise because they used code languages I had told them I hadn't had a lot of experience in, but continued to ask me questions despite my "I don't know"s. After this technical portion, the two interviewers were much "colder" to me than they had been previously. I asked them 10 minutes worth of follow up questions and then we left.
They told me they would contact me in 2-3 weeks.
Overall the process took about 6 weeks from first contact to end of interviewing.