Its values, its interview process and the questions it asks, in short episodes. Listen on a walk, then practice.
10 episodes
John Deere's interview process is unusually predictable: 2–3 rounds, heavily behavioral, almost universally STAR-formatted, with a panel-style final round. Average hiring timeline is 25 days. Difficulty rating is 2.91/5 with 75.1% positive experience. This module walks through every stage of the process, lists the exact behavioral questions recent candidates reported on Glassdoor, and gives candidates the final-mile prep needed to close the loop.
John Deere is operating in one of the toughest agricultural downturns in years. Farmer income is squeezed, commodity prices are below breakeven, the company has cut more than 4,500 jobs since 2015 (with over 2,167 layoffs in Iowa and Illinois in 2024 alone), production is shifting to Mexico, and CEO John May has explicitly called fiscal 2026 "the bottom of the large ag cycle." This module gives candidates the substance to demonstrate commercial awareness in interviews without sounding negative about the employer they're trying to join.
The right-to-repair fight is the single most likely "tough question" in any 2026 John Deere interview. The FTC and the Illinois and Minnesota Attorneys General sued Deere in January 2025 for anticompetitive repair practices. In April 2026, Deere agreed to a $99M class-action settlement requiring it to make software and diagnostic tools available to farmers and independent repair providers. The FTC case is still in discovery. This module gives candidates the facts, the company's official position, and a framework for discussing the issue honestly without trashing the employer.
The autonomous 9RX tractor and See & Spray are John Deere's two most strategically important product lines and the most likely topics to come up in any technical interview at the company. This module gives candidates the specific product capabilities, engineering trade-offs, and customer-economic context they need to speak about these flagship products fluently — at the level a current Deere engineer would expect.
Under CTO Jahmy Hindman, John Deere has built one of the most sophisticated end-to-end tech stacks in industrial America — Operations Center cloud platform, 1.5M+ connected machines, deep AI/ML pipelines from Blue River, retrofit autonomy from Bear Flag, and a strategic OpenAI partnership. This module gives technical candidates (software engineers, ML engineers, data engineers, embedded systems engineers) the substance they need to talk about Deere as a peer-level technology employer, not a "factory job."
Leap Ambitions is John Deere's public, time-bound 2026/2030 strategic framework — the most concrete articulation of where the company is going. With targets like 1.5 million connected machines by 2026, 500 million engaged acres, and 10% of revenue from recurring software/services by 2030, Leap Ambitions tells candidates exactly what bets Deere is making — and which capabilities they're hiring against right now. The CES 2026 unveil of the autonomous battery-electric tractor was the freshest signal that Deere is on track.
John Deere's higher purpose statement — "We run so life can leap forward," powered by the brand promise "We run for all" — is more than marketing copy. It's the explicit framework leaders use to recruit, retain, and evaluate talent. This module gives candidates the language and the substance to use Deere's purpose authentically in interview answers, especially the most critical question of all: "Why John Deere?"
John Deere has five explicit core values: Integrity, Quality, Humanity, Commitment, and Innovation. Humanity was added in 2024 — the first values change in years — based on direct feedback from employee engagement surveys. Every Deere behavioral interview is implicitly mapped to these values, and candidates who can prepare a STAR story for each one consistently outperform candidates who treat the interview as a generic Q&A.
John May has been CEO of Deere & Company since November 2019 and Chairman since 2020 — and he is the architect of the company's "Smart Industrial Strategy," the framework that explicitly drives every product decision, every leadership promotion, and (yes) every hiring decision at Deere today. This module gives candidates the language and the context to talk intelligently about where the company is going, including the September 2025 leadership reshuffle that promoted Cory Reed and Deanna Kovar into expanded roles.
John Deere is one of the oldest continuously-operating industrial companies in the United States, founded in 1837 by a Vermont blacksmith who invented the self-scouring steel plow. Understanding this 188-year arc — from a one-man shop to a $45B agricultural-technology powerhouse with the largest fleet of autonomous farm machines in the world — gives candidates the substance they need to answer "Why John Deere?" with genuine conviction rather than generic flattery.