Pre Placement Talk :
Every company that visits a college campus, holds a pre placement talk where they make the students familiar with the company goals, work culture, environment and future. It is very important for a candidate willing to get placed in a company to sincerely listen to the pre placement talk and note down a few important points. This can help later to answer questions like "Why do you want to join our company?" or "Do you have any questions for us?". Some of the points that I noted down were -
- Target tag line - Work where you love.
- Opportunity to explore different technologies.
- Target promotes Learning and provides financial support if you take up any professional course.
- Target Insurance benefits - The insurance coverage is not just for the target team member but also for the family.
Round 1:
Round 1 was an online coding test on Hackerearth. The test consisted of 11 questions. First 10 questions were MCQs where a code snippet was given and we had to predict the output. The last question was a coding problem. This carried the highest points (100 to be exact).
Coding Problem - Given an array of numbers that specify cost of different products(in dollars), print the output specifying the product selling cost after providing a discount of 30% to products which had initial cost above 50 dollars.
Sample input - 100, 120, 30, 40, 80
Sample output - 70, 84, 30, 40, 56
Any programming language can be used for this on Hackerearth platform.
Round 2:
Technical Round 1-
Only 16 candidates out of approximately 80 were selected for second round.
The panel had 2 interviewers. The questions were mainly asked based on whatever we had mentioned on our resume. I had mentioned Java, Sql, Git. I was asked a few questions on Java such as
- OOPs concept
- A simple Java program to calculate sum of an array
- SQL queries - Select, Joins, Primary Key and Foreign Key constraints, Normalization, ACID properties. I was first asked to draw sample tables and fill it with dummy data and then asked to write queries to fetch certain data from the table.
- Git and Github - Why is it used
- About one of my web development project and database design that was used for same.
Just before leaving I was asked if I had any questions for them. Never say no as this shows your curiosity and interest to join the company. I enquired about the tech stack that Target uses and how they supports allowing engineers to work on different technologies. They were happy to answer it and give an example from their own experience at Target.
Round 3:
Technical Round 2-
The panel again had 2 interviewers. The questions were again based on resume. This panel had notes from the panel who took my first technical interview. Be careful about what you have said in your previous round. They know where you had got stuck and what is your weak point and can stress on it in this round.
Some of the questions that I was asked -
- Type of access specifiers in Java and what do they mean
- Inheritance and Abstract classes
- Merge sort and its efficiency
- On what basis does Google decide what links to show on each page when you search in the browser
- I was asked about one of my Android projects and was asked to write code that handled external rest api call. Though I was not able to write the exact syntax, I wrote down the structure of Asynctask class that I had used to make api call asynchronously. They were satisfied with it.
- What is Synchronous and Asynchronous process and specify example from daily life for same.
At the end, I was asked why I wanted to join Target. I mentioned some of the points that I had noted down during the pre placement talk. The interviewers seemed happy that I had good points and Target specific details and that my answer wasn't generic one.
I was asked again if I had any questions for them. I enquired about how Target supports learning for employees and how much of financial support is provided. I also asked about what kind of courses do Target employees take up.
We did not have any HR round. Out of 16 of us, 3 of us were given offer for Software Engineer role.
What do they usually look for in a candidate when they come for campus hiring -
When the placement cell had asked the interviewers regarding what they look for in a candidate, the reply they got was - "We want candidates who have passion in the field of Computer Science. It is necessary that the student has tried taking up some projects or internships during their engineering. This shows that the candidate had interest to do something more than just college academics and gain more knowledge. Also, the candidate must have solid foundation of Computer Science concepts."
