I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Cisco (North Sydney) in May 2014
Interview
I was called by the HR manager to organise a phone interview. The phone interview was a week later and was conducted by a senior network engineer. There was a face-to-face interview about 2 weeks later which was a group interview and individual technical interview with 4 other candidates and a panel of 4 network engineers.
Telephone questions included:
1. tell me about yourself
2. what do you do in your spare time,
3. what do you know about the company, why do you want to work here
4. give me an example of learning new things in the work place,
5. give an example of a time when a customer didn't like the solution you gave them, what did you do?
Group interview questions:
1. You and your group have crashed your plane in a jungle, you have these limited resources, what do you do? Fairly standard.
2. A customer owning a factory has employed you to fix a vague problem with one of their machines. The panel plays the part of an impatient rude customer, and they see how the group solves the problem.
Individual interview questions:
1. Consisted of a network diagram on a whiteboard and there was a problem with a computer not connecting to a subnet, there were firewalls involved too. They asked increasingly difficult technical questions to see if you could solve it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Telephone interview:
1. how does the internet work
2. how does encryption work
3. what is the OSI model
Group interview / individual interview:
Speak up in the group interview, work as a team but show you can take charge as well.
Unless you studied network engineering at university, you will probably fail the technical interview. The questions are very in depth and you can't bs your way out. They interviewed 20 people (4 groups of 5 people) for 1 position. They invited a lot of people for the interview which would definitely fail the technical interview simply because it wasn't part of the syllabus of their degree. Not sure why they didn't just invite network/telecommunications majors to the interview.