Zoho Interview Experience | Off-Campus November 2020

Hi there, I have attended Zoho off campus drive for the Member Technical Staff during November 2020. Due to Covid Situation, the entire interview process happened Online. I have applied through the Zoho Careers portal through a Linkedin post and I got the mail as and when I complete each round.

Round 1: This is as usual the MCQ round consists of 45 questions with no negative marking and section-wise timer. 20 Quantitative Aptitude, 25 C and Java debugging questions to be solved in 45 minutes. I got results in 4 days saying I got cleared and selected for the next round.

Round 2: This round is a live coding round where I need to screen share and code in my local machine. There would be 6 questions with increasing complexity from simplest to the hardest and I have solved 4 questions out of 6 in 3 hours.

I was given a simulation of the Stone and Balloon problem.

Given SSBBB populate the 5 columns with the input string

Include a size check from user input like the number of stones/balloons can’t increase than the number of rows

Include a condition like when there are 3 stones over a balloon in a particular column that balloon will be burst and all stones should move a position down

Include a condition when a balloon bursts it should propagate to all balloons in that row and contiguous balloons in that column as well

Since I didn’t get to the 5th question I didn’t know the 5th and 6th questions. Results came after 2 days with the description of the next round.

Round 3: This round is an offline task to prepare a presentation about the features and architecture of the Cassandra NoSQL database and I need to present that before the panelists.

Some questions were

1. How to delete a record in a node?
2. What is a tombstone?
3. I have a computer. How will I add it to the Cassandra Cluster?
4. How to handle if a node goes down?

This round is basically testing how we apply the technical knowledge even if we are not aware of Cassandra. Results came after 4 days and I went through this round as well.

Round 4: This is a Technical F2F round. Questions were about My project in the office and personal projects. After that, I was asked to implement Redis Cache in Java and I tried my best. The Singleton design pattern with slight modifications is the only thing that I could crack.

The Interviewer seemed to be ok with my performance, and they scheduled the next round on the same day.

Round 5: It was an easy round and mostly questions about Pillars of OOPS and 1 or 2 puzzle questions. This interviewer got satisfied and scheduled the Manager round on the Same day

Round 6: The manager Round was the toughest of all and the expectations were too high. She has asked me how to add more features to my project and questions about AWS.

HR called me after 6 days and said the Team that I interviewed was not satisfied with my performance but there’s an opening in another, and he asked me would I like to attend. I accepted that and the next round was on the same day

Round 7: Since I have completed the managerial round already, this team just wanted to have interaction and check my capability and fit for the team. It is more like a general discussion and two coding questions were given

Reverse the String from the given index.

Sort the date String based on the oldest date first without using an inbuilt comparator. I have just overridden the comparator interface, and she accepted my solution.

Round 8: This round was taken by the Team leader of that team, and I was given an Aptitude question to solve and I solved it in 15 20 mins.

Round 9: This the HR round and questions were

1. Why Zoho?
2. Why are you leaving the current company?
3. What is your current and expected Salary?

I got a call after a Week from the HR team Saying I have cleared the Interview process, and they have sent the offer letter the very next day.

Tips

1. Since I was not selected by the first I got a second opportunity(Mostly happens only with Zoho)
2. If you have cleared the 3rd round offer probability is above 50%
3. There is a slight change in the interview process like the presentation round.
4. Since everyone is working remotely there may be some delay in getting results. Attend the rounds confidently and wait patiently
5. One core advice is to Be strong in your basics and things will fall in place.

All the very best and See you at Zoho !!