Cerner Interview Experience | (For Software Engineer)

On-Campus Recruitment

Round 1 : HireVue Round

This was a 60 minute online aptitude round consisting of two sections.

Section A : Mathematical aptitude, logical reasoning and analytical skill assessment questions. This section contained 30 MCQs and an allotted time of 40 minutes. Difficulty of questions ranged from medium to hard but one can analyse the options and guess the answers easily without actual calculation. Analytical questions take the most time to solve.

Section B : English Grammatical assessment questions. This section contained 20 MCQs  and the remaining time of 20 minutes to solve the section. Difficulty is pretty easy if you’re comfortable enough in the language. This section also contains a small passage followed by 3 MCQs from it.

You have to score at least 75% to clear this round, but the cut-off might be flexible depending on the average performance.

Round 2 : Group Interaction

This was less of a group thing and more like Just-A-Minute, but they call it Group Interaction nevertheless. Qualified candidates were divided into groups of 10 students and each group was assessed one at a time. Each candidate selects a random piece of paper which had a topic written on it and the candidate has 10 seconds to think about it and then starts speaking on it. The recruiter kept a stopwatch and one has to speak for one minute. Consider yourself lucky if your turn comes towards the end as you will have more time to think about your topic ! Even if you don’t have enough material for a minute, just be clear, audible and confident in what you say.

Pretty easy to clear this round, 9 out of 10 qualified from my group.

Round 3 : Technical Interview

This was my first ever interview experience and I must say they were very (I can’t stress on this enough) friendly. So the team that came to our campus had 5 interviewers, each conducting one to one interviews to speed up the process. Here’s what I experienced:

He told me to have a seat, shook hands and introduced himself.

Question 1: So Abhijit, introduce yourself.

Gave some basic details about myself then moved on to my technical achievements and my project.

Question 2: Yes Abhijit I see your project is very interesting (He had my resume) tell me more about it and what was your role in it.

Detailed description of the project and my role, discussion about how it works internally and a few other queries that he had. It was an android project and I asked him if he wants me to show it to him as I had it in my phone.

Interviewer : Yes, I’m definitely interested to have a look.

Explained everything live !

Question 3: So I see that coding is your passion, which language are you most comfortable in from these in your resume?

Java (Safe choice)

Question 4: Why so?

Gave basic reasons why java is better and also a few personal preference reasons.

Question 5: Write this code for me.

He gave me to write a function that returns the first number in a list of numbers that is divisible by 7. I was a bit surprised as I was expecting something difficult.

Question 6: Very Well. Now lets test your concepts (Smiles). Have you used interfaces anywhere? If yes, where and what is it.

Defined and said how I used it.

Question 7: So why did we suddenly need Interfaces in Java?

Told.

Question 8: Okay so Interfaces brings us to inheritance. Suppose there are two classes having one method in each and they have the same name. How would you call the child class method form a driver function that is inside the child class?

Told.

Question 9: And what if you want to call the super class method?

I didn’t clearly listen to the last part of the previous question and was confused a bit and gave a pretty silly answer.

Interviewer: (Laughs) Yes, you can do that from anywhere but I think you did not understand my question properly. He repeated the question.

Answered and apologized for not getting the question.

Question 10: Nice, now do you know about global and local variables? Why do we need them Abhijit?

Explained in detail.

Question 11: You’re doing good. Now tell me what data structures you have used while competitive coding and why did you use them.

Told about Stack, Queue, Priority Queue, Lists and Maps.

Question 12: What about sets? You haven’t used it?

Forgot about it and said that I have.

Question 13: What is it? Why would you typically use it when you already have Lists?

Explained.

Question 14: Let’s talk about abstract classes for a moment. What is it?

Defined.

Question 15: Okay but why do we need interfaces if we already have abstract classes? What’s the difference?

Gave basic differences between them.

Question 16: Have you ever written to a file in Java? How did you do it?

Basics about FileWriter class.

Question 17: Okay write a code snippet where you open any existing file and write anything in it.

Wasn’t exactly sure about the syntax as I did not use it in recent times, so I gave a basic pseudo code about the steps involved.

Question 18: But what if you don’t close the file after writing to it?

Genuinely never thought about it and made up a probable answer.

Interviewer: (Laughs)That’s not exactly what will happen but something along those lines. I’ll take it.

Question 19: What knowledge do you have about databases?

I didn’t like that subject and I was completely honest about that and how much I know.

Question 20: That’s alright, but I assume you know the basic concepts of keys and transactions.

I affirm.

Question 21: Tell me about the different types of keys.

Told.

Question 22: Which one is unique? Primary key or Foreign key? Or both?

I said both (Confused about foreign key)

Interviewer: No Abhijit, foreign key is not unique. I’ll explain it to you. He drew two tables and explained why I was wrong.

Question 23: Tell me whatever you know about transactions and ACID properties.

Told whatever little I knew.

Interviewer: Alright Abhijit, it was nice meeting you.

Thanked, shook hands, left. This lasted for about 40 minutes and some candidates were interviewed twice if they felt their performance was not satisfactory enough but found some positives in them.

Round 4 : Versant Test

This was a unique test, something never experienced before. You can learn more about it here. For a live demo watch this.

There were six sections exactly in the order mentioned in the above sample pdf. The key to this round is the clarity of your voice and your pronunciation. If you watch American content without subtitles or listen to podcasts then you will definitely be benefited since the voice that speaks to you speaks in American accent. Just be calm and listen carefully, if you miss a word or some part, forget about it and concentrate on the next one. This round is of around 20 minutes with 50-60 questions. There is a minimum cutoff for this round so answer accordingly. Cutoff was 58/80 in our case (as told by them) but we didn’t know our marks anyway.

Results :

All qualified students were handed their offer letters on the spot, followed by a discussion on further proceedings. They also gave T-shirts inscribed with the Cerner motto to everyone ! They took group photos of us along with the recruitment team, all of us wearing the same T-shirt! Happy to be a part of the photo. Good Luck to whoever is preparing for this and I hope this helped you!