IBS Interview Experience

IBS Software is an IT company based out of Kerala, India mainly focusing on travel and logistics. The pay grade for freshers is around the same offered by the likes of Wipro and TCS. As a general trend, IBS tends to gravitate towards recruiting Mechanical Engineering freshers rather than Computer Science albeit being an IT company. This may be due to the fact that they support mechanical oriented companies rather than IT, and this seems to vary a bit among the different campuses they visit.  I applied for IBS when I was in the final year of my B.tech program as a Computer Science student.

Round 1: Written Aptitude Test

The first round of the IBS recruitment process was the online written aptitude test conducted on the Amcat platform. The test was true to the common Amcat patterns including sections such as verbal assessment, quantitative assessment, logical reasoning and finally a test section which depends upon your branch of study.

This section included questions from the core subjects of your specialization. As I was a computer science student the questions were from object-oriented programming, operating systems, data structures, and DBMS. There were also questions in which you were asked to predict the output of a program given on the screen. Interestingly, students of electronics and electrical engineering were also given the same final section questions as computer science students. This seemed rather strange because there are a lot of core subjects that CS students learn during their course which are completely unknown to electronics and electrical students.

If you are unfamiliar with the Amcat platform, there are a lot of mock tests available on the internet which would greatly help in clearing the test as a lot of questions are repeated.

The result was announced within a week and I had cleared it.

Round 2: Group Discussion

In the second round, the students who cleared the first round were split into groups of 10 and a group discussion was conducted with a moderator from HR. The topics of the group discussion were chosen randomly from the internet just before it took place. What our group got was “Is death penalty a justifiable punishment for atrocities against women”. The moderator marked the scores whenever a candidate spoke and three or four were chosen from each group to the next round.

I spoke reasonably well and got selected for the next round along with a total of twenty or so candidates.

Round 3: Technical Interview

The technical interview was about 30 minutes long. The interviewer mainly asked questions about projects that I had done during my course period and really got into depth on that. I was asked about minute details of the project and I think they were trying to filter out candidates who had only memorized their project and had no real experience doing it. The questions they asked were such that they could be only answered if you had real experience on the project.

Apart from that, I was asked questions about OOP concepts, DBMS and Data Structures. I was also asked to give real examples of these questions like writing a program showing polymorphism in OOP. If you are preparing for the interview, it would help to learn real examples along with theory on these subjects. DBMS queries were also asked like Innerjoin, Outerjoin, etc

All in all, the technical interview seemed rather rigorous for a service-based company. Although I could not answer all the DBMS queries asked, I had a reasonably well project with me on which the interviewer was impressed with. It helped me get selected for the next round.

Round 3: HR Interview

There is a trend in IBS that HR interview is where most of the candidates get disqualified in the selection process. The questions that were asked are the cliched questions of HR like introduce yourselves, your hobbies, why you chose IBS, etc. Some candidates were also asked to solve puzzles during the interview. Out of 6 students selected for the HR interview, only one got the offer letter. For me personally, it felt like the interviewer was really not interested in conducting the interview and was very neglectful and lax which was not at all the vibe I got during all the previous rounds. They were very professional and a pleasure to interact with.

I was not selected from the HR interview.

These experiences shared are of a particular selection panel of IBS which came to the particular college I took my interview in. They may be different from what you may experience although the trends remain true.