- I submitted my resume to the Grace Hopper Celebration database, and it was forwarded to multiple Apple recruiters who were looking for New Grad candidates.
- Each team at Apple has its own designated recruiter, and because my resume was distributed to many teams, I ended up doing a number of phone screens. The phone screens usually were not difficult because they were only 30 minutes long. They mostly tested knowledge based trivia questions along with asking about your past work experiences and projects. It was pretty overwhelming because multiple recruiters were trying to contact me, all from Apple, but it felt ridiculous having to do so many phone screens that all essentially looked for the same skill sets. They even had a recruiter that just started her job, who contacted me by the wrong name and wrote down the wrong information about me, which I felt was fairly unprofessional and disorganized.
- Because there were many teams in contact with me, they hired a single POC recruiter to manage my onsite, which really helped. Scheduling an onsite during the fall is a bit difficult because Apple gives their employees the entire Thanksgiving week off, and many people go on vacation during December. Anyways, I ended up scheduling it and was told I would have 4 2-on-1 interviews. It turned out to be 8 45-min interviews for 4 different teams and I didn't find out until I had a "break" when a hiring manager came to talk to me. Thinking back, it was probably the most mentally stressful day of my life. Note that I probably could have split it up into two days, but because I had other obligations, I asked for a single day interview.
- In terms of question style, most teams liked to focus on problem solving and algorithmic questions, covering data structures, trees, graph search, etc. one of the teams asked me to find bugs in a piece of code. Another team really focused on class design and asked me to describe the architecture one of my past projects.
- Although I was offered breaks in between the interviews, I felt pressured not to take them to keep everyone on schedule. It was also really tough doing so much talking throughout the day (literally met with 16 people that day). My performance was likely diminishing as the day went on, and I knew I didn't do too well on some of the interviews.
- The overall feel of the Cupertino office: the building I was placed in was beautiful. The cafes serve extraordinary food and the people I talked to were very smart and sounded like they were doing exciting work. As often noted, Apple is pretty secretive even internally. Some teams I talked to say they do code review through email, which I found pretty strange.
- In the end I did not move on to the next round (which would be another onsite for whichever teams were still interested). Overall, I wish that Apple had a more generalized interviewing process for New Grads. The disorganization really displays how segregated Apple is as a company.