This is an On-campus new grad hiring from tier 1 college.

Round 1: This is an online assessment round consisting of 4 DSA problems of medium-hard range of leetcode. The duration of the round is 60 minutes.After completion of round they asked to fill a google form consisting Jee rank, Coding platform ratings, GitHub profile, CGPA. Total of around 50 students were shortlisted from this round.

1. https://leetcode.com/problems/unique-paths/
2. Given number of pages in n different books and m students. The books are arranged in ascending order of number of pages. Every student is assigned to read some consecutive books. The task is to assign books in such a way that the maximum number of pages assigned to a student is minimum.
3. Count ways to partition a Binary String such that each substring contains exactly two 0s
4. I don’t remember exact question,but it is similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/largest-rectangle-in-histogram/ . Can be solved using stack.

Round 2: This round happened on day 1 of On campus interviews. This is a F2F interview round through google meet. Interviewer started with asking my intro and then asked a DSA question. Slightly modified question of https://leetcode.com/problems/lru-cache/ . He first asked me to discuss my approach. I started with a basic brute force approach using 3-4 hashmaps and in linear time. Then I optimised it to O(logn) time complexity. I tried to converting it into O(1) time complexity using LinkedList. But my logic will not work for few edge cases. He then gave a hint and I am able to solve the question properly. It took around 30 minutes for the discussion of approach to get an O(1) solution. As round is only for 40-45 minutes, he told me not to write the code as he is satisfied with the explanation. Then he told me about his work at zomato and his recent achievements. I asked few doubts regarding his work and how did they tackle few problems (mainly about search option in Zomato app as the interviewer worked on this particularly). This discussion went on for another 5 minutes and he ended the interview by adding few points on work culture at zomato.

Verdict: Accepted.

Remarks: After shortlisting for F2F round, they completely focused on problem solving skills and approach towards the problem. There is no discussion on past internships or projects. Try to communicate continuously with interviewer throughout the interview. Paying attention to their work at Zomato and asking few interesting doubts will be a bonus point that pushes your selection.

PS: If you are not from a CSE background, try to keep 2-3 software related projects or internships on resume and GitHub profile.This provides a medium to talk about your work in HR and HM rounds. I got rejected by few companies in final rounds and I felt this might be the reason for it. One of the HR has also gave feedback to improve my resume with some projects and open source contributions as he found my resume was more suitable for a core role and I was applying for a SDE role, so he felt that I don’t have much clarity about the role I wanted to do.

Happy coding :)