First, I talked to hiring manager and two people from the team over the phone. Then I traveled to job location for half day interview with 6-7 team members and managers. Then hiring manager called and made an offer. The culture is excellent at cisco. They manage to keep the startup culture and treat you as human.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Cisco (San Jose, CA) in Sep 2012
Interview
I applied for this job through Cisco's external website. As a former Cisco employee I found it easy to get phone screens, interviews, and job offers with multiple groups. When I showed up at the interview it was almost as if they had already decided to hire me. I met the hiring manager, who talked about the position at length. We spent most of the time discussing my background and interests and also went for a lab tour. I also met a tech lead and another manager but it was more of a conversation than an interview. Also met the director (see below).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Since I was a former Cisco employee there were no difficult questions. The director did try to play some sort of personality quiz with me by asking me to describe 3 adjectives that would describe me (typical psychological mumbo-jumbo).