Barclays Interview Experience | On-Campus 2020

Recently Barclays visited my college for campus placements. Barclays is a bank which is around 300+ years old and it’s head office is located in England. Barclays gives a lot of importance to it’s values (RISES) and ethics. Like a lot of importance. In the pre placement PPT it was mentioned that they judge a person 50% for his/her technical skills and 50% on the basis of the required values.

Selection Process-

First was the mcq + coding round. Mcqs consisted of some output based questions, some sql and os questions and also some questions from servlets and cloud. Coding section had 2 questions one easy and one medium level. Everyone had different sets of questions and solving one of the coding questions was necessary to get shortlisted.

Next day they sent a list of 107 students that were selected for the interview rounds.

That was a very large and surprising number. Interviews were conducted 3 days later. And though they gave a proper schedule for the interviews, it became very difficult for them to manage so many interviews in a single day(as expected!). There were 14 interviewers and every interviewer was allotted 7-8 students. So there were 14 slots. One slot for each interviewer.

First Interview Round-

The interviewer seemed friendly. As the process was virtual(on webex), there were a lot of connectivity issues during the interview. At the beginning she hadn’t received my resume from the HR. So I sat sat there 30 minutes waiting for the HR to send her the resume.

Finally we started. She asked to introduce myself. Then she asked the various technologies that I had learnt. She asked me some questions about my projects, some basic OOPS concepts, some Dbms concepts and that was it. Then she asked some behavioural questions like Why Barclays? What do you know about Barclays? Do you want to go for higher education?

And that was it. This was the pattern followed for all the interviews. But there were some interviewers who Didn’t had any technical knowledge so they were just asking behavioural questions.

Then we waited for the list for students that had been selected for the second round of interviews. The list came after 2 days. But it was the list of directly placed students (yes, we all were surprised). There was no further technical or even HR interview.

More surprising was the fact that they had selected 34(again, surprise.. surprise..) students directly from the first round and they said to expect one more list from them.

My name was in the first list only. They sent the second list containing 23 more names after some time. So at the end of the day we were all happy that they had selected 57 students from our college.

But then after 2 days we got to know that there was a “slight”  miscommunication between the VP and the HR and that they weren’t “allowed” to select so many students from a single college. So they said that some of the students would be removed from the list(Sad reacts only) and we would get to know the final list in a couple of days.

I think that this was pretty unethical on their part, especially considering the importance that they give to their so called “Values”.

Everyone was stressed because there wasn’t any well defined way of predicting how the final list would be made. And as everyone was asked easy questions, everyone’s interview had went very well. There wasn’t much to differentiate between students.

Then after being in suspense for 3 days, they sent a list of 27 students that had been finally placed. I wasn’t selected. 15 out of the 27 were girls(there were only 15 girls in the 57 that they had initially selected).

What I(or anyone) doesn’t understand is that on what basis did they select the 27 from 57, apart from gender of course.

They selected 4 students from some slots and none from some.

In the end I’d say that the process was very stressful and unorganized. It lasted for over a week. It was very unethical and unprofessional from their behalf. I hope this helps you and you don’t have to go through such experiences.