I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Apple in Aug 2007
Interview
The first call back was to set up another time to talk for an over the phone quiz to determine my technical troubleshooting skills. After that, I was told I was a a great candidate and that they'd need to do my background check as the next steps. After a week of background checks, we scheduled an interview with the regional manager to check me out.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Apple (Knoxville, TN) in Jan 2007
Interview
The recruiter called me after seeing my resume on Monster.com. He was very affable and friendly. He asked me if I would be interested in interviewing for the Genius position for the first Apple Store in this city, and immediately said yes. I have worked on Macs for ten years, and have great people skills so I was pretty confident about doing fine. He asked when I'd like to do a phone interview/mini-skills quiz, I said, "right now." which sounded like it caught him off guard, and he sort of stammered that he'd have to call me back in an hour. The phone quiz was about 5 questions long, which I passed quickly and easily having been a Mac technician. He said there were some other interviewees, but he said he was pretty sure I'd do well in comparison. He emailed me a few days later and scheduled a personal interview for a few weeks later.
The personal interview was in a local hotel lobby, consisting of the Manager and Lead Genius from a store that had already been built. They were friendly, questioned me on my people skills, a few in-depth random technical troubleshooting questions, and basically role-played scenarios with me as the would-be genius. Easy and pleasant. After a weeks or so, the recruiter called and offered me the job, conditional to the store being built.
Next, however came an excruciating wait of a MONTH before he finally gave the go-ahead to send me the actual offer letter, and gave a start date for Genius Training, which was about 3 weeks later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What items in this list should not be present at an ESD safe Workstation:
Humidifier
Packing styrofoam
Ion generator
Grounded Mat