About Company
Barclays is a global British bank located in London, England. Barclays is divided into two divisions: Barclays UK and Barclays International, which are supported by a service firm called Barclays Execution Services. Barclays is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index and has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange. It has a secondary listing on the New York Stock Exchange. According to a 2011 report, Barclays was the most powerful transnational business in terms of ownership and consequently corporate control over global financial stability and market competitiveness, with Axa and State Street Corporation claiming the second and third spots, respectively.
Recruitment Process:
- Round 1: Online Assessment
- Round 2: Technical + HR Interview
Barclays Eligibility Criteria: Graduation(BE/B.Tech): CS & IT students from Final year, with ≥ 60% score across class X, XII, and engineering semesters.
Round 1: Online Assessment
- This round was a proctored test of 90 mins on the HackerEarth platform which consisted of 2 Sections- Technical MCQs and Coding.
- There were a total of 30 MCQs and each of the MCQs was of either 4 or 6 points.
- There was a 4-6 Output-based MCQs on STL C++, Java, and Python. Apart from this, a few questions also included the CS Fundamentals including OOPS, SQL, DBMS, and OS.
- The coding section consisted of 2 questions. The questions were:
The Minimum Sum: Given an arrayof size with positive and negative integers. Also given an integer. You can repeat this process any number of times(>=0): Choose an element from the array and apply this transformation, , where return the largest integer if , otherwise the smallest integer . Your task is to minimize the sum of the final array and print the minimum sum. (20 marks).
Max Divisor Tree: Given a tree with the root value N, what is the maximum height the tree can have? The property of the tree is that each of its nodes branches out to the nodes with a value equal to one of its divisors (except 1 and the number itself). (50 marks)
One thing which is very important in this round is proper time management as you have to do well in both sections to maximize your chances of getting shortlisted.
Around 302 students had applied and 34 students were shortlisted. I was one of them and the interview was scheduled for the next day. The interviewer was a VP at Barclays.
Round 2: Technical + HR Interview (40 mins)
- Please tell me about yourself.
- Brief description of the project.
- What is the future scope of your project & Challenges are faced?
- As my project is based on DBMS, he asked me how to fetch data from the back end.
- Questions on DBMS like the definition of DML & DDL, their commands & their queries.
- What is indexing & clustering? How to implement it on a given dataset.
- What is the primary key, foreign key & candidate key?
- How was your coding profile, what languages do you know?
- A brief discussion on OOPs concepts.
- The real-life situation on how will you verify a terrorist if he/she wants to open an account on our portal.
- What do you know about Barclays?
Interview Experience: It is always beneficial if you know what it is to be there at that moment. Be confident & try to give real-life situations examples. Also, try to use mathematical terms, it makes a good impression on the interviewer. At last, the interviewer told that it was nice talking with you.
On the same day, the results are out.
Verdict: Out of 24 selected students, I was one among them.
Tips:
- Be Ambitious
- Do not lie in your resume at all. Mention only those things about which you’ll be confident and comfortable enough to have a discussion.
- Life isn’t fair to everyone at all times, But that doesn’t mean we should be paranoid or disappointed. Learning to accept life as it comes is a sure-shot success to contentment.
- Be with a ZEN Mindset, as much as possible.
Some other asked Questions:
- Normalization
- RISES
- State machine
- Layers of OSI model
- Difference BFS & DFS
- Inheritance
- Copy and compare object
- Stacks: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/check-for-balanced-parentheses-in-an-expression/amp/
- Linked lists, queues, array
- C++ primitive data types
- Exception handling
All The Best!