🚀 My Zoho Off-Campus Drive Experience – April 4th, 2025
Hey everyone! 👋
I recently appeared for the Zoho off-campus drive held on April 4th, and I wanted to share my experience here. The drive saw a huge turnout of around 1500+ candidates, and by the end, only about 10–12 students were shortlisted. Though I couldn’t make it past the third round, I learned a lot and hope this post helps someone preparing for it in the future.
🔹 Round 1 – Aptitude + Java Snippets
This was the first and major filtration round.
We had 20 questions in total:
- 10 Aptitude questions – Medium level (time, speed, probability, logical reasoning)
- 10 Java code snippet questions – Tough and conceptually heavy
⏱ Duration: 75 minutes
✅ Only 90–100 students were shortlisted from the original 1500 in this round!
Tip: Make sure you’re strong in both logic-building and Java fundamentals. And yes, practice aptitude thoroughly — it was definitely the toughest round.
🔹 Round 2 – Data Structures & Algorithms
This was a coding round with 7 questions of medium level.
The topics included:
- Trees (e.g., Validate BST)
- HashMaps
- Arrays & Strings
- Sliding Window problems (both fixed and variable size)
The questions asked in this round were
-
- Validate BST
-
- length of longest substring having distinct characters
-
- Check palindrome
-
- FInd first missing Positive
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- Number of substring having exactly k characters
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- Find the first non repeating character in a string in 1 pass
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- I forgot this question and it was easy itself
✅ Around 40–50 candidates cleared this round.
Tip: Focus on conceptual clarity and edge case handling. Practicing on platforms like LeetCode or GeeksForGeeks really helps here.
🔹 Round 3 – Low-Level Design (LLD)
This round was unexpectedly challenging.
We were asked to design a Task Manager application, and the interview was structured in 8 progressive steps:
- Starting from basic design
- Adding persistence using local file storage
- Handling multiple edge cases and improving functionality step by step
✅ Only 10–15 students made it to the next technical face-to-face round mostly all of them got selected ig.
Unfortunately, this is where my journey ended.
❌ My Outcome & Personal Thoughts
Despite performing decently, I wasn’t shortlisted after LLD. I noticed that most of the candidates selected for the next round were from Tamil Nadu, and while it may have been coincidence, I felt there may have been some bias — especially considering that a few others and I implemented almost the same solutions as some of the selected candidates.
But that’s life — sometimes it's about more than just the code.
📝 Final Tips for Future Aspirants
- ✅ Prepare well for Aptitude – This is the most difficult and most important round.
- 💻 LLD Practice is essential – Go beyond just DSA.
- ⌨️ Get comfortable with online IDEs – You'll be expected to code in them during interviews.
- 💪 Stay consistent and positive – Even if it doesn't work out, every experience counts.
📍 A Note on the Journey
I travelled 600 km for this drive with a lot of hopes, and though it didn’t go as planned, I’m taking this as a valuable experience. To anyone out there grinding — your day will come too. Just keep showing up. 🙌
Feel free to ask me if you have questions about the process. Good luck to all future Zoho aspirants! 🚀
