Zoho Interview Experience Software developer (Off-Campus) 2024

Zoho is a very popular product-based company in Tamil Nadu. It hires freshers for the Software Developer roles and the total hiring is off-campus i.e., you need to come to Chennai at their Zoho office physically to attend the drive.

1. Application:

When you apply for the Software developer role at Zoho, you will get an email that you are shortlisted for the interview process at Zoho. If you are not shortlisted you will not get any mail. I applied for Zoho on 14th March 2024 and I got the shortlisted mail on the same day evening.

2. Written Test (16-03-24) :

There were more than 3000 applicants who came to round 1 and it was a written test that consisted of 15 Aptitude questions and 10 C programming pseudo codes. These all were the fill-in-the-blank questions without options, I guess the one who got 20+ questions correct will be shortlisted for the second round. They will announce the results after completion of your written test and the not-shortlisted ones are asked to go.

3. Coding round (16-03-24) :

Out of 3000+ students 60 got shortlisted to round 2. The second round was on the same day afternoon, they had provided us the lunch and a temporary id card. The exam started on 1:30 pm and lasted till 4:15 pm. There were 6 questions of easy, medium and hard level. The questions are similar to balanced parenthesis, find the missing operator, min and max consecutive ones in an array, find the beautiful pairs (DP based), BST based question and last one was a hard question. I have solved 4 questions completely out of 6. This exam was on Hackerrank platform.

4. Advanced Programming round (20-03-24) :

The recruiter called me and told me that I was shortlisted for the next round. This was also conducted at the Zoho office at 10 AM. There were total 11 members shortlisted for this round. They gave us a question and provided us a laptop and told to develop an application on your favorite ide.

The question was to develop an application that has the following functionalities:

1. Set 2. Get 3. Unset 4. Count 5. Update 6. Begin (new transaction) 7. Commit 8. Rollback (recent transaction)

We all were instructed to start building the application at a time. There were only 3 interviewers listening to all the codes of candidates at a time, my advice is to interact with the interviewers as much as possible that helps to get you shortlisted. In my case, I thought of first building the project and then I will explain it to the interviewer as they were already busy. I developed the application and showed it to the interviewer then she was like there is nothing special in it (as she already saw the other codes) and asked me to optimize for the commit case. I optimized it and showed her but still she was not satisfied.

The results were declared after lunch, I was not shortlisted for the next round, hence I feel that you need to maintain a good conversation with your interviewer share your approach and ask any queries and talk to them confidently and frequently, otherwise you will not get shortlisted like me even if you have done with technical part.

But the HR called me and said that “there is vacancy in other team for the same role and we would like to consider you for this team but you need to undergo the interview process again starting from the Coding round”, then I said OK.

2. Coding Round (02 – 04 – 24):

There were 6 questions and the test was on Hackerrank platform. I have solved 3 questions and also the interviewers asked to explain the approach of the problems which we have not solved. This time I was pretty careful and I explained the approach and also specified the TC & SC. My rank was 2nd in the coding contest and after lunch they called out the shortlisted candidates names and others were asked to leave. I got shortlisted to next round.

3. Advanced Programming Round (02-04-24) :

They gave us a question and told to develop an application. Firstly, I tried to reach to the solution and then I explained the approach to them, they satisfied with my approach and told to code it. I have coded the solution and then I showed them my code, the interviewers asked me some questions on my code and also some cross questions to test my knowledge. I was confident and answered without any fear.

The question asked here was LFU cache (Leetcode HARD).

They were impressed by my solution and they discussed to take me to the next round in front of me itself.

4. Technical Interview (02-04-24):

The interviewer first took a look on my resume and asked some questions on that, after that some basic questions on OOPS, projects, some puzzles, some DSA based questions theoretical, a coding question but just asked to explain the approach.

After that the interviewer left and another interviewer came to me and asked further questions like the technologies you know, C based questions, where I am from, family background etc.,. After that the HR came to me and said to go the tower building for the HR interview.

5. HR Interview (02-04-24):

The HR asked some basic questions like intro, why zoho, salary expectations, higher studies interested or not, managerial questions etc., and atlast told that the results will take 2 weeks to declare and said to have dinner before leaving.

On 11-04-24 it was Eid (Ramazaan) and I was celebrating Eid with my family, evening at 5:12 PM HR called me and said that I got selected. My whole family was happy.