I applied through college or university. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at IBM (East Lansing, MI) in Nov 2010
Interview
I submitted an application on their online career page and received an email from a recruiter about a week later stating interest in interviewing me. I set up a time to have a brief phone interview with the office-designated recruiter before being offered the chance for an in-person interview. The in-person interview is scheduled via an online scheduling system. I picked the time and place that was most convenient and met with two people for that interview. One interview was a personality interview, which contained many of your normal HR-type questions. The second was the technical interview, which ended up being fairly easy. There was no writing component, but instead only talking through your experiences with the programming languages they were looking for. Less than a week later I was contacted by recruiter letting me know that I should expect an offer, and I was contacted via phone less then a week after that with the formal offer.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Explain a time when your project work didn't go as planned, and explain how you got through the difficulties.
I applied online. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at IBM (Lansing, MI) in Dec 2012
Interview
I was first interviewed by an IBM recruiter over the phone; from there I was interviewed by a hiring manager over the phone. I then moved on to a general interview followed by a technical interview.
The general interview is just what you would expect, questions on work ethic, team work, and personality.
The technical interview was not that bad. If you can't pass it then perhaps you should be looking into a different career. Someone with basic programming training could pass easily.
Overall I felt they did a wonderful job of making you feel comfortable with the interview process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There wasn't really much in the way of difficult or unexpected questions. It was what I would expect for the nature of the job and the skill level sought.
I was asked if I am the type of person to follow what others say when it comes to projects or do I take charge and/or question the group leader or do I follow blindly.