I applied through university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Thomson Reuters (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2015
Interview
The hiring process starts with a phone interview from one of the heads of the quantitative research team. He will give an overall idea of the projects going on and in turn ask about your background. If it works well, you will another 2-3 phone interviews going more in the details of the projects and you will asked how you will approach the problem at hand. Each interviewer will ask you about a different aspect of the problem (e.g. algorithms, coding).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How will rate companies looking at the stock prices over time?