Cognizant Digital Nurture Interview

Overview

This interview was an all in one interview. Both technical and HR related questions were asked in the single interview. I got this opportunity through the Digital Nurture Programme by CTS consisting of a series of assessments which includes an English assessment followed by a technical assessment, a training programme in the given domain and a final technical assessment based on the training programme.

The Interview

My domain was full stack java development. So after asking about myself, the interviewers went to the technical part. They mostly asked fundamental level questions and related core concepts.

The Questions

• What is the difference between the different type of access modifiers?
• What are the differences between abstract classes and interfaces?
• Differences between compile time and run time polymorphism.
• Explain some features of Java 8 which you have used.
• What is dependency injection?
• What is Spring IOC?
• What is Spring Data JPA?
• What are SQL window functions?
• How would you classify a students table based on their department?
• What are components and hooks in react?
• How can you display a proper error page for any endpoint not created?
• New features of HTML 5 that were absent in HTML 4

Then they tested my coding skills and gave me 2 questions to solve

• Given an array of numbers, extract pairs summing up to 15.
• Write an SQL script to extract the employee details with the largest salary and the second largest salary.

After they were done with the coding part, they went to the HR, managerial and some GK questions too!

• Suppose we don't give you the position you came to interview for and instead gave you some other position. Would you still be willing to work?
• Are you willing to learn any technology as per market and business demands?
• Are you willing to relocate and work from any location pan India?
• What exactly is Cognizant?
• Who is the current CEO of Cognizant?

Preparation Tips

• Focus on the basics and fundamentals. Interviewers test whether you have the basic knowledge or not.
• Have a good knowledge on the technologies and projects in your resume.
• Have ample amount of hands on coding practice as you can remember the concepts better when you see them in action.
• Research and know about the company you are about to go for an interview.

Interview Hacks

• Be honest with what you answer.
• Interviewers also check how do you handle situations when you are unable to answer any question. Be confident and politely tell them that the topic is currently unknown to you and definitely you would learn about it in future.
• If you are in final year, make sure you are able to explain your academic major project.
• When asked by the interviewer if there are any questions for him from your side, never ever ask about interview results. You can ask him about the questions you failed to answer or about his/her experience in the company.

Good luck to everyone preparing for their interview! Stay calm and surely you will ace it!