Cognizant Interview Experience | Set 2 (On-Campus)

Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTS) has revised its whole hiring process in 2017. The recruitment process is nowhere related to the one that is supposed to be in past.
Earlier it is used to be a tremendous mass recruiter and it is no more now. The level of hiring has decreased, and the level of compensation has increased.
CTS recently came to our for campus recruitment process.
Designation: Associate
Detailed Recruitment Process:
Pre-screening Test:

• Pre-Screening test will be conducted for initial elimination over the pool of students that have registered for the drive.
• Students of streams B.Tech-CSE/IT, M.Tech-CSE/IT, MCA, M.Sc Computer Science, B.Tech-ECE, M.Tech-ECE, B.Tech-EEE, B.Tech-Biotechnology, B.Tech Mechatronics who have throughout 60% without any standing arrears were eligible to apply for the drive.
• So around 800 students had registered for the drive.
• The company may ask the university/college to conduct the pre-screening test according to the number of students applied for the drive. In our case, it asked because 800 is a big number.

Platform used: Hackerrank
There three coding questions with levels easy, medium, difficult.
https://www.hackerrank.com/contests/seriea/challenges (sign up and continue)
Some Practice Questions:

• https://www.hackerrank.com/contests/cognizant-2/challenges

Finally, 110 students were shortlisted to sit for actual placement drive of CTS.

Actual Recruitment pattern:
Round 1: (Cognitive & Language Assessment and Level 1 Programming/Debugging skills – online test)

• There were four sections on the first round which had English Comprehension, Critical Reasoning, Data Interpretation, Automata Programming.
• All the four sections were newly introduced in this year’s CTS placement test, especially for Associate Role.
• The total time of the test was 112 minutes.

Platform used: AMCAT

• The English Comprehension section had 22 questions which must be answered in 22 minutes. (Questions were easy but time-consuming.)
• The Critical Reasoning had 15 questions which must be answered in 15 minutes. (Questions were easy.)
• The Data Interpretation had 15 questions which must be answered in 15 minutes. (Questions were bit tricky.)
• The Coding section may contain 2-3 questions which will be of Automata type or Dynamic programming and must be answered in a maximum time limit of 1 hr-1 hr 30 min.
• In our case 2 coding questions of simple automata were there and time given was 1 hr.
  •  Question 1 : Sorting and printing alternate numbers in a given array.
  •  Question 2 : GCD of all the numbers in a given array.

Round 2: Level 2 coding & Programming skills – online test

Three questions were there, Questions were from Dynamic Programming. (Practicing the section of Dynamic Programming from GeeksforGeeks site will directly help a lot.)

Total 20 out of 38 students were shortlisted to sit for the next round.

Round 3: Technical Interview
If we have good domain knowledge and concepts like Java OOPS, Database Tables and SQL Queries, OS deadlock and Critical Section, Paging, Data structures, Complexity of a code, we can easily crack this interview.

Level of questions were easy.
Total 15 out of 20 students were shortlisted for HR round.

Round 4:

HR discussion. Just formality and nothing more. This kind of process is only for associates role.

Author’s Channel Link :

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeNwyWHvyYKMMR1Mu2ieIwg