Salesforce visited our campus in the last week of October for the role of Associate Technical Consultant. They were offering 6-month internship(for Batch of 2022), and after that it will be converted into full-time.
Students having CGPA of 7 and above and with no active backlogs were eligible. Streams like CS/IT, ECE, EE were allowed. Around 450 students from our college sat for the first round.
ROUND 1(Online Coding Test on HackerRank): The initial online coding test was conducted on HackerRank. There were 3 coding questions that were to be solved in 90 minutes. Two were medium, and one was hard. The questions were like:
- A little variation of this question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/connect-n-ropes-minimum-cost/amp/
- The Second question was an extended version of this question. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/largest-connected-component-on-a-grid/amp/. Instead of just largest component, we had to print both the smallest and the largest component on a grid.
- 3rd question was a variation of this question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/search-a-word-in-a-2d-grid-of-characters/amp/. In this question, for us, diagonal traversal was not allowed.
I was able to do 2 questions in the given time. Those who completed two or more questions entered the second round. Around 40 students entered the second round.
ROUND 2(Communication Test – Versant Test): After the first round, Salesforce conducted a quick meeting with the selected students, just to brief them about this communication test. They provided us with a lot of tips and tricks in order to succeed in this round.
- The communication test was conducted on HirePro platform, by Pearson.
- It was a 30-minute test, consisting of 6 parts. You will find a lot of resources on YouTube regarding this test. Here, your listening, writing, and speaking skills were tested. It was also an elimination round.
- Around 30 students cleared this round.
ROUND 3(Technical Interview 1 – 50 minutes): Technical interviews were scheduled 2-3 days after the communication test. In my first technical interview, there were 2 interviewers present at the same time. They were very calm and asked me about my day so far. They introduced themselves, and after that asked me to introduce myself. After that, they asked me a lot of questions surrounding OOPS concepts, DBMS, OS and Networking. Some of them were:
- Explain Polymorphism, both in real-time as well its significance in programming. They also asked me to write snippets to implement polymorphism.
- Banker’s Algorithm. What is deadlock, ways to eliminate deadlock.
- Some conceptual questions based on B and B+ trees, foreign keys, and more. They also asked me about different types of joins and their significance.
- After this, they asked me about my preferred programming language. I said C++, so there were a lot of questions regarding that, like Abstraction, Interfaces and Friend functions.
- After some conceptual questions, they sent me a HackerRank codepair link, and asked me to join it. If you don’t know already, HackerRank Codepair allows the interviewee to write the code, and the interviewers can see my code at the same time.
- They asked me two questions. One was based on Linked Lists and other was based on sliding window technique. I don’t remember the exact questions, but sliding window question was something related to longest substring and duplicates.
- After that, they asked me some SQL queries, and with this, we ended the interview with me asking them questions regarding Salesforce technologies and all. Around 22 students cleared this round.
ROUND 4(Tech + Managerial Interview – 45 min): This was basically a technical + managerial interview, where the questions were mostly based on your resume, projects, internships and skills. For me, it was more of a technical interview itself, as there were no behavioral questions, but for some of my friends, it went a bit more like tech+managerial way. So, I explained him about my projects, two of them. One was related to customizing Apache Web Server, and the other was based on LSB Technique of Image Steganography. There were some cross questions.
- After that, the focus shifted to my internship, where I used Microsoft Azure. There were a few technical questions based on Azure and its services. He asked me open-source, Github, Docker and some technologies I am comfortable with. The interviewer basically covered almost everything that was in my resume and asked me questions related to that. Around 10 students cleared this round.
- After this, all 10 students were given Intern + FTE offer from Salesforce. I was one of them 🙂 There was no HR Interview as such, but after we were selected, they conducted an HR discussion where they asked a few HR questions and discussed the next steps.
Some Important Tips:
- Do not underestimate the communication round. Try to give it as seriously as other rounds.
- In Technical interviews, it’s not like that the interviewer expects you to answer all the questions. I answered around 80% of the questions. But it’s important to be confident while answering the questions you know.
- In HackerRank live coding, always first explain your approach to the interviewer, and then proceed further. If your code doesn’t work, don’t panic. Re-read your code and try to find the issue. But remember, the interviewers are always more focused on your approach, rather than output.
- Always know each and every word written in your resume. Don’t write anything that you aren’t confident about.
The placement season is hectic, but always believe in yourself and keep on revising basics.
All the very best.