Michelle Concannon, a software development hiring manager at Cisco Systems Collaboration Technology Group, has seen it all during her nearly seven years at the networking giant: From death grips on the marker during whiteboard tests, to candidates who freeze when the board suddenly seems very, very blank. Concannon, who recently relocated from Ireland to Cisco's San Francisco offices, doesn’t want to see these signs of fear. She wants job applicants to feel at ease. Success at the whiteboard, after all, doesn’t require an absolutely correct answer – it involves thought and logic. Recently, Dice News arranged for Concannon to conduct a mock whiteboard test during a Women Who Code meetup in San Francisco. Lita Cho, a pipeline engineer at DreamWorks, was the interviewee. Here is how the session went, along with post-mortems by both Concannon and Cho:

BTW: Cisco is Hiring

Cisco recently formed a small engineering team to build out its next-generation collaboration suite for enterprise customers and consumers. Concannon is responsible for hiring passionate developers to build server-side cloud apps in Cisco's collaboration cloud. The products run the gamut from mobile to desktop to Web and custom hardware devices on the front end and scalable cloud deployment on the back end. Concannon’s looking for software engineers for Cisco's cloud media services. "Currently, we're hiring for a bunch of different positions," she said. "We're hiring cloud apps developers and mobile developers. We consume a bunch of Web services that we are hosting on the backend." Other team members are looking for senior software development engineers and also a senior DevOps engineer.