Kantar Interview Experience for SDE-1 (On-Campus)

Kantar visited our campus for the Software Engineer role and Business Analyst role. I appeared for the Software Engineer role. The technical test was for two hours on the MyAnatomy platform.

Technical Test:

• Questions were on Aptitude (it was time-based for each question, and was tough), and it included quantitative reasoning and data interpretation.
• The next section was on analyzing comprehensions, like what you infer from it, what option supports the fact in comprehension, etc.
• The next sections were on C++ output questions, C/C++ fundamentals, DBMS basics, and DS/Algo MCQs.
• MCQs on OOPs were also there.

It was an easy round and most of my college friends cleared the test. There was a coding round where we were to join the meeting and Kantar HR and other staff were given a coding question to solve within 30 minutes. Before this round, we were 18 Students appearing for the coding round.

Coding Round: The question was:

• You are given a string s. You can convert s to a palindrome by adding characters in front of it. Return the shortest palindrome you can find by performing this transformation.

Example 1:

Input: s = "DAM"
Output: "MADAM"

Example 2:

Input: s = "aacecaaa"
Output: "aaacecaaa"

You can try this question from Leet code:  https://leetcode.com/problems/shortest-palindrome/.

Tip:

• Do write the most optimal clean code with comments. Write the time complexity and space complexity.
• Only 5 students were selected for the interview. The interview was conducted on the same day.

Technical Interview -1:

• It started with tell me about yourself just like every interview.
• The interviewer asked me about my projects, and how can you extend projects, ie. add new features or how can you scale them up.
• I had mentioned Bootstrap, and Hostinger on my resume, so the interviewer asked about those.
• It was a 45min interview and I had given every question a very good enough answer.
• The interviewer asked me to explain the code I wrote in the test at the end.
• There was one puzzle to solve which was a little easy. i.e., You are given 9coins which look all alike. There was one fake coin that you need to find out. The weight of the fake coin is a little lesser than other coins and you have a weighing machine. Try to solve it and post it in the comments. You have to give an optimal solution.

Some questions were:

• How to add CSS? (Inline CSS, Internal CSS, external CSS).
• Tell me the syntax of adding the CSS file externally. (I have mentioned HTML/CSS as my skill)
• Tell me some data structures you know. What are the uses of data structures in real life?
• Differences between LinkedList and Array List?
• Explain Normalization.
• Explain the difference between RDBMS and DBMS.
• Explain the difference between inner join and outer join with examples.
• Explain the left outer join.
• Asked me to write a SQL query based on joins. i.e., You are given two tables with one of the attributes in common, you should print the matched tuples of the same attributes from the two tables.

Hint:  we can simply use a Natural join.

• Asked me to tell anyone pillar of OOPS. I’ve told the four pillars of oops and chosen Abstraction. She asked me to give examples and what would happen if there was no concept of abstraction in the particular example. 
• Asked me a Coding question based on the 2D matrix to replace all even numbers with 0.

After a week they were given the shortlist-only 2 out of 5 were selected including me. They had conducted another technical round.

Technical Interview -2:

• It also started with an introduction. The interviewer asked about my family details and some other questions.
• It was 30min Interview. The following questions were asked.
• The interviewer asked questions related to Normalization from DBMS and Asked me about 1NF with examples on notepad (you’ve to share the screen).
• He asked me about oops and mostly on Inheritance. Why does java not support multiple inheritances?
• Explain Interfaces and Why we can extend multiple interfaces?
• There was one coding question to solve. You can practice it on GFG, the question was missing the element of Ap.
• It ended with asking me questions to the interviewer.

Verdict: The result for the Software Engineer role was announced and I was the only one Selected for the position from our campus NITGOA.