ZenLeads Apollo.io Interview Experience (On-Campus)

ZenLeads visited our campus virtually for placements in January 2022 it was a dream company. Students of CS and circuit branches were eligible. The recruitment process consisted of 5 rounds in total (3 coding tests, and 2 interviews). The recruitment procedure is as follows:

Round 1: Coding Round 1 (Test): 

There were 3 questions to be solved on code byte in 90 minutes. Questions were: 

• Question similar to coin change problem. 
• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/coin-change2448/1
• Maximum level sum in a binary tree.
• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/max-level-sum-in-binary-tree/1
• A state consists of n cities. All roads in the city are bidirectional. We have to find the length of the shortest route between two given cities, with a twist that you can eliminate the distance between any “k” connected cities (eliminating a distance means you can make the distance between two connected cities as 0, you can do this “k” times).

49 out of 400 students were selected based on this round. Need to score 100% to get selected.

Round 2: Coding Round 2 (Test): Two DSA questions were asked in this round in 45 min. The Questions were of medium to the hard difficulty level. One was from the graph and the other one was from dynamic programming one has to score 100% to get through this round. 25 out of 49 students were selected based on this round.

Round 3: MCQ round (21 minutes): The technical section has questions like finding the output of C and Java programs mostly on classes, data structures, sorting algorithms, and threads in Java, and questions on GIT, LINUX, OOPS, SQL, DBMS. In this round, 35 questions were asked and they selected the ones who had a more than 75% score in this round. 17 out of 25 were selected for the interview round.

Round 4: Technical Interview (60 minutes): A variation of this question was asked as the head node wasn’t given that is it wasn’t certain to which manager CEO will give the message and my task was to first find out which node should be the starting point and then find the total time taken to reach all employees.

• https://leetcode.com/problems/time-needed-to-inform-all-employees/

Also, input was not a simple integer it was a structure containing a name, employee id, and an array of employees reporting to that employee. I went ahead with graphs for solving this question, first ran a DFS to find out the head node that is the employee to which if the CEO gives the message it reaches all employees, and then ran a BFS to find out the total time taken for the message to reach all employees. Questions on my projects and subjects like Operating Systems, Computer Networks, and DBMS were asked, the interviewer discussed my all projects and asked a few cross-questions.

A total of 5 students were selected from this round.

Round 5: cultural fit round (30 minutes): This was an HR round. First, he asked me about my college life, my passion, etc. Then we discussed my internships in detail. Later he asked about my strength, and weakness and what is an ideal company for me? Later he asked me questions like if I give you 1 million dollars where and how will you use it? We had a deep discussion on it.

Questions in this round were:

• What would you do if a conflict arose between you and your colleague?
• What websites do you visit when you get any problems with your code?
• Did you find anything interesting in the previous rounds of interviews?

I advise you to write beforehand answers to your introduction, weakness, strengths, why should we hire you, why this company, why this college, why this branch, justify your CGPA, why this club/society, why this internship, why this approach in your internship, challenges faced in projects, how you solved them and similar such problems to crack this round.

2 were selected after this round and I was one of them.

Suggestion: Have in-depth knowledge of your projects. You should be able to answer any question on your project.  

All the best!!