I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Cisco (San Jose, CA) in Nov 2010
Interview
got an interview from employee referral, everything went smoothly, mostly nontechnical question (even though it was an engineering position). heard a word from manager that my offer was being processed, and then the whole financial fiasco started. they had a major hiring freeze for couple of quarters, and finally decided not to hire for that position due to budget cut.
They care about your skills, rather than your background. They have a template which they provide and you got to fill that, everyone is provided a unique number. You are instructed not to disclose any of your personal details in the due course of your interview.
The interview process was two rounds. The first round was a behavioral interview. Straightforward questions, like tell me about the most technically challenging project you have worked on. The second round was a system design interview.
3 technical rounds of 35-45 mins each for a 5 years experience JS fullstack.
1. Project currently working on + design patterns employed and resume based questions in details to check the depth.
2. System design interview - asked me to mention an approach to design a microservice for retail client. Followed up by questions on why I've chosen a particular tech stack and questions on how to tackle certain situations in real word on such services (inventory + payments etc).
3. DS based test - question was bit easy.