I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Cisco in Mar 2010
Interview
Phone interview, in person interview, meet director; the interview is relative straightforward with some programming test. Two rounds of interviews with team members; questions are ok. Some are tough ones deeper into Cisco IOS and industry trend
I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Cisco
Interview
They have two stages - phone and in-person. It is quite smooth. They want to verify all of basic features. They may ask you to write answers of technical questions. In-person interview lasts quite long.Keep aside 3-4 hours. Keep in mind they are trying to select you - not reject you. So as long as you know basic things you should be okay.
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Cisco in Sep 2014
Interview
I was asked a technical question on Machine Learning during the recruiting at a Career Fair straight away while reviewing my Resume. The question was on the possibility of separating houses for a Realtor into various clusters. I answered the question by proposing a Decision Tree (ID3 Algorithm) or a Linear Separator, depending on the number of features that the test data had.
I then was offered a phone interview, where I was a standard question regarding Data Structures and Algorithms. (Can't spit out the details, sorry).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The question regarding the Data Structures was difficult because at best I could get a run-time of O(kn), or O(nlog(n)), but that wasn't close enough to O(n), which is what they wanted.