Barclays Interview Experience (On-Campus)

Barclays recently visited my campus K. J. Somaiya College of Engineering(KJSCE), Mumbai. Barclays Global Service Centre (BGSC), India is a global capability center, supporting Barclays businesses worldwide, delivering innovative end-to-end business solutions in Technology, Operations, and Functions. They were hiring for a Graduate analyst role (BA3).

The eligibility criteria were 60% and above in X, XII, and engineering comprising Comps and IT branches only. There were 230 students who appeared for it. The selection process consisted of two rounds.

Round 1: First round was a technical test of 1 hour 30 mins which comprised 30 MCQs covering a vast number of topics and technology like C, Java, OOPs, DBMS, Data Structures, SQL, Mongo, Azure, JSON, etc. 

The test also comprised of two coding questions out of which 1 question was of medium difficulty requiring concepts of sorting and greedy algorithms the second question was of hard difficulty requiring concepts of dynamic programming. 

The questions were different for everyone and the test was held on the HackerEarth platform. 

Out of 230 students who applied 19 were shortlisted for the Phase-1 interviews. 

Round 2: The second round was an interview with a VP from the company.

The interview was online on the Webex platform. The interview started with a brief introduction about me and my family background.

After that, we had a discussion about the two projects that I had mentioned in my resume. He asked me questions about the projects. The questions were about the technologies used in it and he also asked about the challenges faced while doing the project, the time frame of the project and the motive behind the project.

Tip: Do not be dishonest in your resume and just mention things you have honestly worked on and have detailed knowledge about it. 

After discussing the projects, he asked me a question on Data structures. He asked me to explain the concepts of stacks and heaps. After giving a satisfactory explanation with examples he asked me whether I had used these in my projects to which I responded by saying that I haven’t directly used these data structures but my project had many recursive functions and I explained to him how recursion uses an internal stack. He seemed quite impressed by this answer.

Later he moved on to asking non-technical questions based on the famous Barclays values(RISES).

I was asked three situational based questions on the RISES values and the question usually always had a correct answer inclining towards one of the five values. One of the questions that I was asked was based on the value “Integrity”. He asked me that if one of my project partners was sick just before the deadline and the work could only be completed on his system then what would you do? Take his credentials and complete the work yourself or inform you that you cannot meet the deadline. This question was asked to some other candidates as well and most of them replied by saying that they will take the credentials but this could potentially put the data of the company at risk and would totally go against the value of integrity.

He then asked me about my higher studies plan and also about where do I see myself in the next 5 years. He also asked me whether I would like to work with frontend or backend and why?

Finally, he asked whether I had any questions for him. Always have a question ready for the end and ask a good question based on the technologies in the company and other aspects.

After 2 days the results were declared and 11 students were selected. I was very happy to see my name on the list.

After 1 week the company came out with a shortlist of 60 students for Phase-2 of the interviews.