Cognizant Campus Recruitment Process on 25.02.2011
Eligibility Criteria: 60% throughout (X, XII, UG/PG)
No year Gap
Only 2011 Pass out
Venue: FIEM, Sonarpur (it was not an on Campus Process)
Reporting Time: 8:00 am
My experience
I was 15 mins late, but it did not create any issue
An auditorium sought of place was given to us so that it can accommodate at least 400 students, 452 were eligible. Cognizant came at around 9am, and when I saw the entire team I was simply stunned, more than 35 people came, out of which 33 were interviewer (I came to know about them before the interview). The T.P.O of the FIEM introduced Mr. N Ghosal, the HR Manager of Cognizant.
Mr. N Ghosal, introduced himself and started off with the ppt session, it was damn good and inspiring
After 30-45 mins of ppt session we were asked to get ready for the Aptitude test, a consultancy named Meritrake came in with a team of more than 20 people and divided the entire group of students into several rooms, they had taken every possible measure so that no unfair means occur.
A form (data sheet) was given to fill-up, followed by two question papers (2-sections)
Total 55 questions were there, 60 mins time, 2 sections, 1-logical and quantitative 2-Based on English, no Negative marking but sectional cut-offs were there.
Aptitude result was declared by 1.30 pm, and panels were allotted to the selected candidates, there were 33 panels, and 5-6 students were allotted to each
I was in panel 1.
The interview session began, 1:1 interview, Technical and HR was combined, and the single man that was sitting on the other side was more than enough to make us realize that he was from CTS and the questions wonât be as smooth as we were thinking
I was waiting for my turn to come; seriously, I was quite tensed and nervous though my face did not reflect that. At that moment of time I was completely blank, I could not even remember the syntax for inheritance in C++, anyways I had to wait till 5.30pm, as the interviewer was taking a lot of time with a single candidate, so you can imagine how sweet the interview session could be, sitting with the interviewer for than 30mins, minimum, gradually I started to make up my mind that I have to face the person on the other side of the desk, and if I get tensed then everything would be in a mess, actually I was not tensed, neither was i nervous, it was a different feeling, which you can only feel when your waiting outside that ROOM.
Me : Sir, may I come in
Me: Good Afternoon sir (I was standing with my bag on one shoulder, and a file in my hand)
(I took my seat, kept my bag on the floor, and the file on my lap)
X: (with a smile on his face) so you are Shyam, from JISCE?
X: so you are the topper? (smiled again)
X: show me your certificates, class X and XII (I gave him the original),make sure that you put back all the certificates safely
(He started calculating my percentages, one by one) and said all are perfect
Me: which school sir?
Me: Naihati
Me: (told) (and he continued writing everything in his evaluation sheet)
Me: yes sir, we had DS in our 3rd sem
Me: (after sorting the array by Bubble sorting technique) sir done
Me: (surprisingly) why sir? (I went through my code,â¦.but couldnât find any mistakes) (Gave it back to him) sir it will work
Me: (eagerly waiting for him to point out my mistake) yes sir
X: Can you tell me its time complexity?
X: what projects have you done?
X: do you know Linked lists?
X: ok, have you heard of circular, doubly, circular-doubly linked lists?
X: how can I search an element from the linked list? (Passed that paper to me again)
X: your choice, I just need to understand
X: take your time (gave a pleasant smile)
(I continued with my âsearchingâ function)
(After completing, I looked up again, found him busy writing something, so I started checking my code, if there are some errors)
X: oh , let me have a look (going through my code) yah good
Me: (made the changes)
Me: (told)
X: write down a recursive function to print the fibonacci series in Java
(Finished writing the code, I didnât print the a and b as 0 in the beginning, I took a=-1 and b=1, and gave him the sheet back) sir done.
X: (he looked impressed) (he took the paper back, wrote a small code snippet) what will be output of the following? (The code was written in C++, a bit tricky)
X: what is string?
X: how can you copy one string in another?
X: without strcpy?
X: ok can you relocate outside Kolkata?
X: ok last question Iâll ask you, if you can answer you are through
(I was excited)
Me: x=6; y=123 (as â+â will act as a concatenation operator),and z= (he took back the paper)
They announced the result around 7.30pm,