Overview of the interview process at cognizant:
Cognizant offers two packages- GenC (Base package) and GenC Next(Higher Package).
Round 1: Online coding round conducted on AMCAT, which consists of 3 sections:
- Section 1-Aptitude questions: (level: easy to medium).
- Section 2-Code debugging: (7 questions): Language selection option available at the start, allowed languages where c++, Java, and Python. Also, the time for this section was 20 minutes, so it should be done with good speed and accuracy.
- Section 3- Essay Writing: Need to write an essay on a given topic in 150-200 words. The topic I got,’ Turning Points in your college life.’
Also, 25 out of 600 students(our college has huge strength), were selected for round 2, the rest were shifted for GenC interview.
Round 2 (Coding Round): The test was conducted on the AMCAT platform, which had 4 coding questions (2 easy, 2 medium ):
- Question-1: Given an array of 0’s and 1’s, transform(change 0 to 1 and vice-versa) the bit if the adjacent numbers are either, both 0’s or both 1’s.(Note: The left adjacent for the first index is 0 and the right adjacent for the last index is 0) (Difficult – easy)
- Question -2: Find Hamming Distance. (Difficulty – easy)(Link: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/hamming-distance-between-two-integers/)
- Question-3: Dp Question – Given a 2D matrix, find the maximum product sub-matrix with the first index(meaning: submatrix which always consists of the element at index (i=0,j=0) ) ). Need to print the maximum product. (Difficult- Medium)
- Question-4: Graph Question – Find the Number of Islands. (Link: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-number-of-islands/)
9 out of 25, were selected for round 3, the rest were shifted for GenC interview.
Round 3 (Technical +Hr Round):
- Interviewer: Introduce Yourself
- Me: Gave a brief intro.
- Interviewer: Why you choose CSE?
- Me: Told my interest in CSE.
- Interviewer: Tell me about your strengths and weaknesses in brief.
- Me: Answered
- Interviewer: Which projects have you done? (asked me about the project mentioned in my resume).
- Me: Gave an explanation of my android projects.
- Interviewer: Why you shifted from Android Development to flutter? (mentioned in resume)
- Me: Told the benefits of making apps in a flutter.
- Interviewer: What are transitions, do you think are required for a transformation from college to the corporate sector?
- Me: Answered
- Interviewer: What are the modern/ the latest technologies that are trending in IT?
- Me: ML, DataScience, IOT, BlockChain, etc.
- Interviewer: Can you give a real-life example of where Machine Learning is used.
- Me: Gave an example of a social media website.
- Interviewer: Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a co-worker who wasn’t doing his / her fair share of the work. What did you do and what was the outcome?
- Me: Answered.
- Interviewer: What are the skills required for an IT Professional?
- Me: Answered
- Interviewer: Do you have any questions?
- Me: Asked 2 questions
- Interviewer: Answered.
PS: Interview results were declared after 1 month and 7 out of 9 got selected for GenC Next, and I was one among 7 🙂