I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at ATEM (Santa Clara, CA) in Oct 2012
Interview
I had 90 days to secure employment before I ran out of my student visa status so I looked for the company with the best Network Engineer training preparation in good weather. No other consulting company sent me pictures of the Labs or equipment I would work on so the choice was pretty simple. Interview was general. They wanted to know what level of cisco certification I had achieved during my master's program and what my current Visa status was. I had CCNA, they wanted CCNP. Training for CCNP took me about 3 months but it took some of my batch-mates 5 months.