Barclays Placement Interview Experience For Software Engineer (On-Campus) 2023

Last Updated : 16 Oct, 2023

Barclays visited our college (Pune Institue Of Computer Technology) in Sept 2023 for a Software Engineer role for the 2024 batch.

Company criteria :

10th & 12th: 65% and above

CGPA: 7 and above (No active or passive backlogs)

Selection Process: The selection process consisted of 2 rounds, the First being the Online assessment (OA) followed by a Tech + HR interview.

Online Assessment

The OA was conducted on HackerEarth.

Consisted of a total of 14 questions and the test duration was 1hr 30 mins.
The first 12 questions were MCQs based on Java, SQL, C++, error handling, and OOPs. Difficulty was easy to medium.
The 13th question was SQL query-related. The task was to find the information of customers from October in ascending order given the date in (yy-mm-dd) format.
The last question was the coding question String Generation. https://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and-answers/given-string-s1-length-l1-consisting-latin-uppercase-alphabets-string-s2-length-l2-consist-q119232564

To clear the online assessment you need to know the basic concepts of CS fundamental subjects such as DBMS, Java, OOP, and DSA.

You can watch YT videos of these subjects. For JAVA I would suggest you watch Kunal Kushwaha’s DSA and OOP playlist.

In-person Interview

Talking about the second round combined interview of technical + HR. The person who took the technical the same person takes the HR round. My Interviewer was VP at the Barclays. Most of the Interviews at Barclays are taken by their VPS.
He first introduced himself. He was leading the DevOps team at Barclays having 7+ years of experience in the Software field.
Then he asked me to introduce myself. As everybody does, I was in a very well-prepared position to answer this question. I gave him a brief about my educational background followed by my technical skills and my projects.
He seemed to be interested in one of my projects so he asked me to explain that project in detail, and asked some questions based on the functionality of the project.
Then the interview moved toward the OOP. The questions were
What’s all this hype about Object-oriented programming? Why people are using this programming technique rather than others?
So, in addition to answering this question, I also explained to him the pillars of OOP with their real-life examples related to banking and their implementation code in Java.
While I was briefing him about the pillars he constantly asked some detailed questions about each of the topics, like Dynamic method dispatchers, access modifiers, and others.
Later I was given a DSA problem to solve. It was to take an entire sentence as input and return the word with maximum length. I provided a solution in both C++ as well as Python. He continuously asked questions while I was writing my code on paper.
Then I was asked if I had a good understanding of Cloud Computing. Though I haven’t mentioned Cloud in my resume, I had Cloud Computing in my University syllabus, so I was well equipped with some of the knowledge.
He asked some questions on AWS and service models in the cloud and popular cloud service providers.
At last, he asked me 2-3 HR-related questions like what will you do in a situation where your team member needs your help but you are also tight with your work and schedule. will you help them?
And more situational questions.
He also asked me if I had any questions for him. So I asked him 2-3 questions related to the team and the domain he was working on.

The interview lasted for about 45-50 mins. So when interviewing at Barclays, if the interview goes beyond 30 mins that interview is considered to be ideal for selection, though it cannot guarantee anything.

The final list of selected candidates was announced on the same day 1-2 hours after all candidates were finished with their interviews.

Out of 48 students, 10 students were selected for the role.

Verdict: Selected

Tips:

Always have a clear understanding of the basic concepts of CS fundamental subjects.
Most Fintech companies require a candidate with good proficiency in Java. So if you want to secure a job at Fintech, you should be well equipped with Java.
Also reading at Barclays Archived many have mentioned that there is a 4-letter word “LUCK” which you cannot take over.
Express your knowledge simply and concisely.