I was contacted by a Salesforce.com recruiter via LinkedIn InMail. After an informational call with the recruiter, she set up a phone screen with the hiring manager.

The phone interview was pretty general, covering my experience, a few technical questions, and then any questions I had about the job.

After passing the phone interview, I had to take a programming test that lasted about 2 hours. It was done remotely over GoToMeeting and involved a programming exercise to create an iPhone app in Xcode.

After passing the programming test, we set up an onsite interview. There were 5 interview sessions, lasting on average 45 minutes each. Several of the sessions were done via video conference or Skype.

Questions covered the usual topics:

• Object-oriented design and data structures
• iOS concepts
• Unit testing and UI automation
• Work experience and behavioral questions

Lastly, I talked to the hiring manager again about team fit and career goals.

The programming exercise was good. You had 1 hour and 15 minutes in Xcode to:

• Write a simple iOS application with data persistence.
• Implement a shake motion gesture.
• Localize it into French and Spanish.
• Ensure the UI resized correctly.

Then, you had to write the test cases for your app. All told, if you knew what you were doing, you should have the basics done in under an hour. From there, you could spend the rest of your time making the UI pretty.