Shell Interview Experience 2021

Shell had its online test on 25th August 2021 and 600 students were eligible for the test. The job roles they were looking for were Transformation Change Analyst and IT Software Engineer. We had the option of choosing either one of them or both of them. The complete recruitment process for both the roles was the same. 

Round 1:

This was an approximately 2hr long test, with a fixed time for different sections, and the time couldn’t be carried over.

1. The first section had 2 questions with approximately 60 mins to solve them.
   • Given n bowls with an increasing number of marbles in them, one of the bowls is missing; we have to find the number of marbles in the missing bowl. Given (n+1)%2==0 always

     Example: 
     Input: n=5, arr[]={1,3,5,9,11}
     Output: 7

     Explanation:
     In the series 1,3,5.. the missing element is 7. So the number of marbles in the missing bowl is 7.

   •  A number of unique elements in an array of n elements up to k, where k<n.

     Example:
     Input: n=9, k=5, arr[]={1,2,1,3,2,4,5,7,2}
     Output: 3

     Explanation:
     Upto k=5, the array has the elements:{1,2,1,3,2}, and the unique elements in this array is {1,2,3}.
     So the number of unique elements upto k=5 is 3.

2. The second section had one SQL query to be executed in 15 mins. The query was to print the count of records where the price of the items was more than 10000.
3. The third section had 25 technical MCQs mostly based on data warehousing, DBMS.  
4. The fourth section had 25 aptitudes MCQs, with sufficient time to solve all of them.
5. The results of this round were declared later that day, and around 138 students were shortlisted from that.

Round 2:

This round was scheduled for 27th August 2021 and everyone had a slot of 1hr for the interviews.

• The round started with health and safety information from the interviewers, and then they introduced themselves and asked me to introduce myself. They asked about my projects and asked me to explain the work plan rather than the technicalities of the project. We discussed 2-3 projects of mine, and they wanted to know what all challenges I faced and how I overcame them, what was my contribution, was it a team effort or not, how will I sell these projects to potential buyers or investors. They also gave me situations and asked how I would react to them and overcome them. They also asked questions about challenges and tasks I faced during my internship as well as my experience being part of the clubs and chapters in my university.
• Then they asked if I had any questions for them, so I asked them questions about their job roles which they mentioned in their introduction. Finally, they asked what I know about Shell and closed the interview.

They declared the results later that day and selected 89 students, I was one of them.

Tips: 

• The interviewers were very friendly, so don’t think of it as an interview, but consider it as a conversation between 3 people.
• Be thorough with your resume, as they ask questions about it.
• Do your research about the company, and attend the pre-placement talk attentively, because they may ask you questions about the company, and it’ll be easy to answer them if you have attended the pre-placement talk.
• Think of some questions you might want to ask the interviewers about the company, this shows them that you are interested in the company, and you’ve put in efforts to know more about it.
• Prepare a good introduction for yourself mentioning your interests both technical and non-technical, and if you have projects based on your interests, then that’s a brownie point.