Halodoc Interview Experience (On-Campus 2020)

Halodoc visited our campus, the National Institute Of Engineering, for full-time employment in the month of December. It was the first on-campus drive that was conducted in the college having f2f interviews. Students of all the branches could participate. It consisted of 5 rounds in total.

Round 1(Coding Round): It was a coding round on the HackerEarth platform. It consisted of two questions and the duration was 1 hour 20 minutes.

• Co-prime Array-Had to find the sum of the product of all co-prime pairs in an array
• Water and the Grid-It was a matrix problem where we had to find the volume of water trapped in between towers. Was similar to this problem

Solving one of the questions was sufficient to go through to the next round.

Round 2(1st Technical Interview): The interviews started at around 11 in the morning. The second round was a technical round. I was asked to introduce myself and then two coding questions again.

• To find the maximum sum path from the root to the leaf-I gave the recursive solution.
• The second was a graph question to find the number of islands-I gave the DFS solution

I was able to solve both questions. He then asked me to implement an auto-suggestion system using a data structure given a dictionary. I first told him a brute force approach. He asked me a better approach for which the told him about hashing, he was convinced.

I was then asked questions about DMBS

• Normalization i.e 1NF,2NF,3NF
• Difference between primary key and unique constraint
• Some question on indexes and its types

I was also asked questions on the Operating System

• The difference between process and threads
• Different types of process scheduling algorithms
• Virtual memory
• Types of page replacement algorithms

The interview went on for about 1 hr 10 minutes

Round 3(2nd Technical Interview): It was the most difficult of all the rounds. Required thorough knowledge of OS, DBMS, and the projects you did in your previous semesters. The interviewer first started by asking me if I had hosted my project on any website for which I told him that I had hosted it in GCP using app engine and cloud SQL. Some questions asked were:

1. To draw the ER diagram of my latest project and then some questions on that.
2. Gave a table and told me to normalize it, some questions on joins(especially self joins) and also nested queries, told me to write some queries also.
3. Drilled on questions from OS which required thorough knowledge. Questions included
   • Process, threads, and process scheduling algorithms(round-robin and priority scheduling mainly)
   • Multi-threading and concurrency

Finally, he asked me if I knew about caching and how would I implement caching given a dictionary of strings, and what data structure I would use. I told him that we could use a map to map a particular key(the first character of the word) to a vector and then binary search could be used on the vector to further reduce the time complexity.

Round 4(Managerial Round): The interviewer and very friendly and made me comfortable first by telling his background, about where he studied and his career. Some questions asked are:

1. Do you like to work in a team or alone and also justify the same-I told him that I like to work as a team and also the perks of working in a team?
2. My future plans and if I have any plans of studying further-I told him that I always like to learn new things, so I would continue learning but not as a full-time course, but we have a lot of courses online to upskill ourselves which are really helpful.
3. He then asked me why I would like to join Halodoc?
4. Questions on networking, just the high-level view of how data is transferred from one device to another over the network.

Round 5(HR Round): It was more like a discussion. He asked me to introduce myself. He was friendly and asked if the day was tiring as the entire process had taken some time to complete. Some questions asked were

1. How would I tackle failures?
2. My expectations from the company
3. How would I convince my teammate that my idea on a certain thing is better than his
4. My areas of interest

He then told me to wait outside and that they would announce the results shortly.

We waited for another 30 min after which the results were announce.6 of us were selected finally including me. It was a wonderful experience for me. I enjoyed the entire recruitment process, all the interviewers were really friendly and made me comfortable. I am really happy that I was selected and looking forward to working in Halodoc. We finally wrapped the day with a group photo.