Cognizant Interview Experience (On-Campus)

Hi everyone, I’m here to share my interview experience with you guys for the role of Programmer Analyst in Cognizant. The company visited our campus in the month of July in our final semester. The criteria was 60% throughout including 10th, 12th and graduation degree as well with no active backlog in any subject among all semester. They had came for 3 roles (I don’t remember the exact name of the roles, but they were for 3.5LPA, 4.5LPA and 6LPA). One of the role I remeber is that it was GenC, other’s I don’t remember.

There were total 3 rounds:-

1. Online Assessment
2. Technical interview round
3. HR round

Round 1: Online Assessment

In Online Assessment (OA), the questions were from the aptitude section which includes basic maths like profit and loss, speed and distance, spatial aptitude etc. Specifically the sections are divided as Quantitative Aptitude, Verbal Aptitude, Logical Aptitude and some debuggind questions which have their specific time alloted.

The debugging question I remeber were:-

1. one question was printing only the even numbers from the array, you just have to do a little correction in the logic.
2. second was logic of checking if the string is palindrome or not.
3. check if the number is prime or not.
4. bubble sort logic.

A lot of students sit for this round because it doesn’t need deep knowledge of technical part, debugging could be done if you have prepared well the CS subjects in your first semester coursework. Around 200-300 students were selected after this round. If you are not selected in this round, don’t judge yourself, it totally depends upon the luck factor. I saw some of the CS students were not selected while core branches students got selected. So be chill if you’re not selected.

Round 2: Technical Round

The results of the Online Assessment came after 2-3 days and I was selected for the next round which was the Technical Round. This round was scheduled 2 days after the results came. An online meeting link was sent from the respective person one day before. I revised the concepts of the DSA and coursework. Also I went through my resume so that I do not miss out anything.

The following questions were asked to me during the interview:

1. Give me your short introduction.
2. Real world examples of OOPs concept.
3. Advantages of Linked List over Arrays.
4. Which language do you know?
5. Asked me to write simple code like factorial of a number, design pattern (easy level).
6. Why Python is being used so much nowadays?
7. Check if the 2 strings are isomorphic or not?

and 2-3 more questions were there (which was of easy level). The interview went about for 45 minutes. The interviewer was happy and he told me that I will get to know about the result next day.

This round could be cleared if you had done your CS subject in you semester coursework in a disciplined manner. I would say the level of the interview was very easy.

The results came the next day and I was selected for the next and last round i.e. HR round.

Round 3: HR Round

This round was very short. The time alloted for this meeting was only 15 minutes. The interviewer first asked me tell me about myself that is not mentioned in my resume. I told her the answer (you can makeup anything at the same moment, just be careful that you should know what you are talking about). She then asked me my roll no. and asked me the summation of my numerical digits of my roll number. I took 2-3 seconds and responded very calmly. She then asked me a few more questions like why cognizant, any problems with the relocation etc.

Final tips:

1. Solve as many problems as you can on coding platforms like GfG, Leetcode etc.
2. Do not hesitate to ask the interviewer if you are getting stuck somewhere.
3. Do not mention anything in your resume that you don’t know about.
4. Keep calm and be relaxed. Keep a water bottle near you while giving the interview.