IBM Interview Experience (Off-Campus)

I recently participated in the recruitment process for the Associate Software Engineer position at IBM on April 29th, 2024. The selection process involved candidates applying through the company’s website and subsequent shortlisting based on resume and skills.

The recruitment consisted of four rounds, which I’ll outline below:

Round 1 – English Language Assessment (Virtual/Online):

This initial round primarily focused on assessing English language proficiency. It featured straightforward multiple-choice questions covering topics such as synonyms, antonyms, and completing sentences. There was no time constraint per question; candidates had a fixed timeframe of approximately 15-20 minutes to attempt as many questions as possible. This segment proved to be relatively easy, providing a good opportunity to secure a strong start in the recruitment process. I had given this almost a week before the coding round, and you get a link which is active for 2 days to complete the assessment.

Round 2 – Coding Assessment (Physical Event/Offline):

The coding assessment presented the ultimate challenge, featuring one to two questions revolving around data structures and algorithms, varying in difficulty from medium to high level. To excel in this round, candidates needed to have practiced extensively on platforms such as Geeks for Geeks, LeetCode, HackerRank, and HackerEarth. Each question had a time limit of 45 minutes (or an hour for two questions). In my case, the problem involved a farmer’s land prices over three years, with the task being to calculate the total profit percentage after four years for each piece of land in the array.

You can practice questions like Pattern based questions, Maximum Subsequence Problem, Palindrome, Longest Common Subsequence, Finding the password of a person using reversal of string and ASCII characters, Kadane’s algorithm, Dijkstra’s algorithm etc for an interview experience passing all the necessary test cases with best optimized approach.

Round 3 – Group Discussion (Physical Event/Offline):

Candidates who cleared the coding assessment progressed to the group discussion round. Here, participants engaged in discussions on topics provided by the interviewer. Evaluation criteria included speaking skills, relevance to the topic, and overall participation in the group discussion. Familiarity with topics such as technological advancements and general knowledge was crucial for success in this round.

Round 4 – Interview (Physical Event/Offline):

The final stage of the recruitment process was the interview round, which encompassed managerial, HR-based behavioral questions, inquiries regarding candidates’ resumes, projects, skills, and technical aspects. Making it to this stage indicated strong potential for securing a position at IBM.

It’s worth noting that all rounds were elimination rounds, and since this was an off-campus recruitment drive, only the English language test was conducted online. Overall, preparation emphasizing data structures and algorithms knowledge proved instrumental in navigating the IBM interview process. IBM is definitely a very popular and renowned company which could help an individual learn and grow, I would definitely suggest to give interviews for it.