Fidelity International Interview Experience (On-Campus)

Fidelity International visited our college to hire freshers for the position of ‘Graduate Programmer’ in October 2022. I successfully cleared the interview process and was offered a full-time role, which I will be joining in 2023.

Here is my interview experience.

The hiring process consisted of three rounds. The initial round was a coding assessment, which was followed by two rounds of interviews: technical and HR. Each round was an elimination round.

CODING ROUND

• It was conducted online on the Mercer Mettl platform and consisted of 2 coding questions and 30 multiple-choice questions. (Duration: 90 minutes).
• In the coding assessment of the interview process, the first question was very easy related to ‘Array Manipulation.’ The second question was challenging and required understanding the Merge Sort algorithm. The multiple-choice questions were quite easy to answer.
• Enough time was provided to attempt the questions.

INTERVIEW ROUND

Round-1 (Technical): At first, the interviewer asked me to introduce myself and after that, he proceeded to ask me several questions related to SQL, OOP concepts, and coding.

Questions:   

• Write an SQL query to find the 7th highest salary from a table named ‘Employee’. Additionally, the interviewer presented me with two other questions regarding the use of the DISTINCT keyword and INNER JOIN, although I can’t recall the specific details of these questions.
• Write a program to check whether a string is a palindrome or not. I tried to keep the interview interactive by telling the interviewer my approach as I wrote the code. We then proceeded to examine the code by taking various sample inputs to test its functionality.
• Tell me about the four pillars of the OOPS concept.
• He started asking questions about Data Structures and he asked me if I had any knowledge of DSA. I replied that I was familiar with Array, Stack, Queue, and Linked List. Then he asked me to define Linked List and write a program to implement Linked List. 
• He also asked me to explain the logic to find the intersection point of two Linked Lists. I first explained to him the Brute Force approach. He then asked me if I could further optimize it, to which I replied that the Two Pointer approach could be utilized for this purpose. He was satisfied with my approach and didn’t ask me to code it.
• He asked me to describe some JAVA keywords like ‘static’, ‘final’, ‘continue’, ‘break’ etc. Additionally, he asked me to identify which one of these is a class or an interface within the Collection and Collections frameworks.
• Explain the concepts of JDK, JRE, and JVM.
• He asked me some fundamental questions related to DBMS, OS, and Networking theories, such as the difference between TCP and UDP, what is Transport Layer, an overview of ACID properties, Super Keys, Primary Keys, and Foreign Keys, and what is the meaning of deadlocks, etc.
• Lastly, he showed me two non-verbal reasoning questions and gave me two minutes to solve them, one minute each. I was only able to solve one question, and he asked me to explain my solution.

Round – 2 (HR):

• The interviewer asked me to introduce myself in a non-technical manner. Then he asked about my hobby and proceeded to ask me some follow-up questions related to my hobby to ensure that I was not fabricating my response.
• He asked whether I am comfortable relocating to the work location or not.
• The interviewer asked me about the three principles that I would always uphold and never compromise, regardless of the situation.
• The interviewer then asked me to imagine a situation where I had a childhood friend-cum-brother, who is involved in suspicious activities and what action I would take once I became aware of it. He persisted in contradicting my answer. But I stood by my opinion.
• The interviewer asked why you think Fidelity International would be a nice organization worth dedicating your time to.

I enjoyed this round very much. Hope this helps. All the best!