Placement Papers - CTS

Hey folks, this is Atindra Chakaravarty from Future Institute of Engineering and Management, Kolkata. Here\'s my experience of the on-campus recruitment drive organized by Cognizant Technology Solutions.

The Selection procedure consisted of :

1. Aptitude test.
2. Technical Interview.
3. HR Interview.

It was a two day process. It began on 25th Sept \'13. After a brief Pre Placement Talk which began around 9 am in the morning... the aptitude test was taken at 12 noon.

It was very simple. Mainly Logical Reasoning, English Grammar, and Quantitative questions(surds, indices, logarithms).

My advice- Solve the two books by RS Aggarwal thoroughly. And also learn to manage your time because that really becomes an issue while solving the questions which come in the quantitative part and the comprehensions.

After clearing the aptitude test, the interviews began on the following day.
As instructed everyone reported to the college by 9 am.

My Tech Interview was taken at around 2 pm. Here\'s how it went.

My interviewer was a middle aged man, with a very stern expression.

I entered with my file of certificates.

Me: May I come in , Sir?
Int: Sure, please have a seat.

Me :Good afternoon
Int :Good afternoon to you too.

He asked for my resume and asked a few things about my residential location, my mode of transport to my college, about my school life, hobbies etc.

I had mentioned two training in my resume 1. Networking (under Tata Steel) and 2. Microcontroller 8051.

He asked me everything about both the training...what I learnt, what might be the use of it in real life..pretty basic and natural.

But all this happened with him having that stern look on his face.

Int: You\'ve mentioned both C and Java as your programming language preferences. How would you rate yourself in them?

Me: 8/10 for java and 6/10 for C.
Int: A man is known best by his weaknesses.

While saying this he scribbled a C programming code and asked me the output for it.

int x=10;
printf("%d%d%d%d",x++,x,x++,x);

I tried it and wrote the answer.

He said it was incorrect as in C, such outputs are read from Right to Left And not from Left to Right(due to stack implementation).

That\'s where I started explaining my logic to him. I debated that my output was correct from the perspective of Java programming which would have printed it from L to R. This went on for a while until he explained the entire structure of C programming in details.

Soon after he said, he had nothing more to ask and whether I had any question for him.

I asked him, in his personal opinion what does he look for in an interviewee.

Answer: See, personally speaking I look for the quality of manipulation in a candidate. It is obvious that everyone may not know everything. Despite that if a question is asked to you, whose answer you don\'t know, how the person tries to solve it is what impresses me.

*Handshake* and I left.

I was a bit disheartened because I failed to answer the only technical question that was asked.

Fortunately, I cleared it and went for HR soon.

My advice: Keep calm, don\'t panic and if you are confident about something, stand your ground.

HR Interview was pretty basic:

HR: What are your hobbies?
    Any problem with relocation?
    How would you convince your parents about your relocation?

My advice: BE yourself, and think before you answer.

This was all about 26th, the results were declared on 1st October along with the results of Wipro.

And I made it in both. :)

Hope this experience helped.
Good Luck :)
Give it your best shot :)