Its values, its interview process and the questions it asks, in short episodes. Listen on a walk, then practice.
10 episodes1 free to try
No subscription needed
This is the mechanical playbook: round-by-round, what to expect, how to prepare, and the specific behavioral questions Nike candidates are reporting on Glassdoor right now. By the end of this module, candidates should be able to walk into HireVue with a fully-loaded story bank, know what each Zoom round will probe, and recognize the difference between an answer that lands and an answer that sounds rehearsed.
Running is field of play number one in Win Now, and it's also the field where Nike has lost the most ground. Hoka and On both built premium running businesses on the back of distinctive technology and patience while Nike was chasing direct-to-consumer growth. Candidates who understand the running market the way Nike's product teams do will stand out — especially for any product, design, marketing, or commercial role.
"Brand heat" is a phrase Nike interviewers actually use. It captures the cultural relevance, desirability, and conversational presence of the Swoosh — and it's something Nike spent the early 2020s losing. The 2024 Olympics "Winning Isn't For Everyone" anthem and the ongoing Travis Scott / Jordan Brand collaboration are two of the clearest signals that Hill is rebuilding heat. Candidates need to be fluent in both.
Move to Zero is Nike's brand for its zero-carbon, zero-waste journey — and behind the marketing, it's a serious decade-plus engineering and supply-chain commitment with concrete 2025, 2030, and 2050 targets. Candidates in product, design, supply chain, ESG, and even marketing roles should be able to talk about Move to Zero with specificity, not platitude.
Nike is, increasingly, a software company that ships shoes. Its engineering organization runs a cloud-native, microservices-heavy architecture on AWS, with Kafka and Spark for data, Amazon Neptune for the social graph, GraphQL for API composition, and a unified customer data platform powering personalization. This module gives engineering candidates the technical fluency they need — and the context to understand the painful 2026 layoffs and tech consolidation.
The first Maxim is "It is our nature to innovate," and Nike puts a 85,000-square-foot building behind it. The Nike Sport Research Lab — renamed the LeBron James Innovation Center in 2020 — is where every Air technology, Vaporfly carbon plate, and new running geometry gets tested on real athletes. Candidates who can talk fluently about how Nike actually invents things tend to outperform candidates who only quote slogans.
You can't understand 2026 Nike without understanding 2020-2024 Nike. Former CEO John Donahoe's Consumer Direct Acceleration strategy cut more than 50% of retail partners, gutted product innovation budgets, and bet the company on direct-to-consumer growth that ultimately collapsed. Every part of Hill's "Win Now" strategy is, in some sense, a correction. Candidates who can speak to the DTC overshoot demonstrate strategic literacy that interviewers reward.
In 2025 Nike abandoned its decade-old organizational structure built around demographic categories (men, women, kids) and rebuilt itself around five sport-led "fields of play." This is the single biggest org change at Nike in a generation, and it's the lens through which most product, marketing, and engineering teams are now scoped. Candidates need to understand it cold.
Nike doesn't have leadership principles in the Amazon sense, but it does have something almost as influential: the 11 Maxims, a set of guiding principles credited to Phil Knight that are taught at every level of the company and celebrated annually at the Global Maxims Awards on JDI Day. Behavioral interviewers explicitly map their questions to these Maxims and Nike's core competencies — candidates who internalize them have a meaningful edge.
Elliott Hill returned from retirement in October 2024 to take over as Nike's CEO, and in December 2025 he formally launched the "Win Now" strategy — a five-pillar, five-fields-of-play turnaround that is reshaping how every team at Nike is structured, measured, and rewarded. This module gives candidates the up-to-the-minute context they need so that when they're asked "Why Nike, why now?" they sound like an insider rather than a tourist.