Condé Nast Interview Experience

Condé Nast took its online test for Graduate Engineer Trainee role as a part of pool hiring on 2nd February 2021.

This is my experience at IIIT Bhagalpur.

Round-1(Aptitude, Technical MCQ and Programming): Total 25 Questions; Time limit: 63 minutes

• It was taken on Glider platform.
• The first round comprised of 24 MCQ questions including aptitude, logical, C output questions and technical portions including Graphs, Trees, Sorting, and Time Complexity.
• Out of these 24, 15 were from aptitude and relatively easy, solvable using common formulas. 9 technical questions involved Time complexity of various sorting operations, ideal data structure for a particular sample case given, inorder/postorder/preorder traversal, infix/postfix expression.
• 1 programming question was similar to “Distinct permutations of a string” with minor modifications. “Distinct permutations of a string” is given on GFG: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/distinct-permutations-string-set-2/
• The result was announced after a week, and 10/50 students were forwarded to 1st Technical interview round. The selection criteria were heavily reliant on if the student has solved the programming question or not.

Round-2(Technical Interview 1): Time: 45 minutes; Tip: Heavy emphasis on Resume and OOPS

• It was scheduled 2 weeks after the online test, i.e 1 week after the result. We were notified on 15 Feb that it was scheduled on 18th, since it was pool hiring, dates varied for students of my institute.
• The interviewers for all students were really comfortable and made everyone at ease. He started by giving his short intro, then asked me to do the same. The starting theme was focused on projects, technologies used in them, and future scope. He also asked about the challenges faced during the projects among other things. He wanted to see if the candidate is motivated to learn new things or not. Then came the OOPS part. He described sample cases and asked for each what fundamental is being applied here, or what should be the proper approach, or how using OOPS, in this case, would benefit an organization instead of hard coding.
• For example, we have to implement a smart car parking system wherein whenever a new car comes, it wants to be parked as near as it could be to the entry/exit gate, so what would the ideal DS or combination of DS here?
• Up to this point 30 minutes were covered, so he had time to ask only 1 coding question. It was something related to Linked Lists, and he finished by asking me if there were some queries from my side.
• The results were declared and 8/10 students from my campus made it through this round to the next round.

Round-3(Technical Interview 2): Time: 45 minutes

• It was scheduled for 4th March. The syllabus was the same as TI-1, but there was an emphasis on DSA and time complexity. He asked to create a linked list https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/linked-list-set-2-inserting-a-node/, to find cycle and node where the cycle starts in the linked list https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/detect-loop-in-a-linked-list/. There were a couple of questions on arrays too. The complexities and optimizations were asked for each question respectively.
• There was an active discussion on projects too after which there was the customary “Any queries for me?” question.
• 4/8 boys including me made it to the HR-Round.

Round-4(HR Round): Time: 20 minutes

• The HR round began with customary questions of introduction, then the strengths and weakness that our friends could tell of us.
• Then she asked about projects from resume but something non-technical about them, i.e. how are they beneficial for community. She asked about teamwork, and risk-taking ability. She told that they maintain “diversity” at workplace, and there is a 50-50 ratio too! That was all.

The results were declared at the end of the month, around 28th March, and unfortunately, none from my campus were selected!! But hey, at least you know about the process now!