Average Interview – Overall Neutral Experience – No – Sat, 26 May 2018
Interviewed in Cupertino, CA
1. I was contacted on LinkedIn by a recruiter about a position in Cupertino. She didn't say what the job was. I responded that day and said I'd be happy to talk. I got no immediate response.
2. About a week later, she contacted me again on LinkedIn. I said (again) that I'd be happy to chat. We set up a time for her to call me.
3. I looked at the Apple jobs site to figure out which job she was calling about. I narrowed it down to two and figured it was most likely one of the two, with only about a 10% chance of it being the other.
4. Phone interview with recruiter. Turned out I was right about the job she was calling about. Pretty standard recruiter interview. If you get to this stage, be prepared with lots of questions for the recruiter. Concluded with her asking for my resume and writing samples, which I sent, and which she sent to the hiring manager.
5. Recruiter contacted me about when I'd be available for a phone interview with the hiring manager.
6. Hiring manager phone interview was a little odd; he spent most of the first part of it talking about the job, and he sounded overwhelmed. His main question for me was whether I wanted the job (not an offer, of course, but more in the sense of whether I would want to do it). I also had lots of questions for him. Interview concluded somewhat abruptly because he had another call or meeting to get to.
7. Email from recruiter that the hiring manager had asked me to complete a writing test. I did that and sent it to her. Hiring manager reviewed it, and I was then asked for times I could come to Cupertino. I provided times.
8. Barely 24 hours in advance of my scheduled interview, I received an invitation from a recruiting coordinator (not the original recruiter). I found this to be short notice, but I was able to do it, so I confirmed I could make it.
9. On-site interviews with several people over the course of 4 hours (with a 30-minute break) + a scheduled FaceTime interview for the following week. Again, if you make it to this stage, be prepared with lots of questions.
10. The next week, I was logged into FaceTime, ready to go several minutes before the scheduled interview. Person never showed. I contacted the recruiting coordinator, who said the person needed to reschedule. FaceTime was rescheduled twice and ultimately cancelled because the person was too busy. Recruiting coordinator said the team would make the decision based on my onsite.
11. No response from Apple for a few days. I then contacted the recruiter to ask about next steps, and she responded within about 30 minutes that the team enjoyed meeting me but it was a no.
Overall, I found the process to be somewhat impersonal and inconsiderate to me as a candidate. For example, see points 10 and 11 above. Obviously, people are busy and may need to reschedule, but Apple should also be respectful of a candidate's time. The process also felt disorganized. Communication in general was not clear. It seemed that information I shared with one person was not then available to another person. I have no idea why not. That's simple to do with technology. Either that, or the people had access to the information but didn't bother to use that access. As a result, I got a lot of the same questions from different people. One person seemed somewhat unprepared to talk to me at all; another seemed to want to just chat. In short, I don't think the team had coordinated before meeting with me individually.
I also don't understand why I had to contact the recruiter about the decision. Given the short turnaround time of her email, I believe she already knew the answer. It's simple to automate "no" responses and still personalize them. There was also very little rapport building, which I found surprising. I tried I tried to build rapport with the people I met, but they did essentially none of that.
I went through the campus recruiting process with Deloitte when I was in graduate school, and that process was much more pleasant. They actually treated you like a person. Even after my experience with Deloitte ended, the company continued to treat me well. Using that as a baseline, I would rate my overall experience with Apple as below average but not necessarily bad.
Interview Questions
Why Apple?
How do you deal with feedback?
How do you deal with criticism?
What do you think of the work we've done? (Some of it was publicly available, and I had been sent links to it.)
I had expected "STAR" model type questions, but the ones I got were much less specific/focused than that.
Answer Question
Other Details
The interview consisted of Phone Interview, 1:1 Interview, Group/Panel Interview and Presentation