BARCLAYS Exp PDF
BARCLAYS Exp PDF
BARCLAYS Exp PDF
Input : 273299302236131
Output : 6
Source: Barclays Interview Experience (On Campus).
Approach: Traverse the digits of the given number from the 2nd digit up to the 2nd last
digit. For each digit check whether the digit is greater or smaller than digits before and
after it. Get the count of such digits.
Round 1: First round was an online coding round which consisted of three coding
questions which lasted for 3 hours. The level of the questions was between medium
to hard as the contest was conducted all over India. We were supposed to appear for
the first round in the team of 3 as this round was common for the Hiring process as
well as the Barclays India Hackathon 2019. They selected only the top 20 teams from
all over India to appear for Hackathon as well as the Hiring Process. So my team
managed to secure the third rank fortunately and we got selected for the next round.
Round 2: Round 2 was an onsite round which was conducted at the Grand Sheraton
Hotel Pune. It was a 15 hours Hackathon but Hiring was not based on the Hackathon.
Meanwhile, during the Hackathon, they scheduled the interviews for the candidates.
The first interview was a Technical one in which the following questions were asked to
me.
1. How to create your own singleton class in Java?
2. What is Lambda in java and for what it is used?
3. What is OOPs? Explain some of the OOPs Paradigms with real-life examples?
4. What is Inheritance in Cpp and How it is different from that in Java?
5. What is a Data Structure and which is the underlying Data Structure used for
developing Facebook?
6. What is a Graph and How it is different from a Tree?
7. What is a Transaction in DBMS?
8. What are the ACID properties?
9. What does ‘D’ represents in ACID and what is its significance concerning a
successfully committed Transaction?
10. What are Rest API’s and why they are used?
11. HTTP is a stateful or a stateless protocol?
12. Difference between HTTP and HTTPS?
13. What is a responsive website?
14. How to create a responsive Website?
15. What is Agile Development? Explain any one Agile Development Model?
The above questions can vary as per the contents of the candidate’s resume. These
were the generic questions asked from the core subjects and the remaining questions
were asked based on projects contained in my resume. From a total of 85 students
(60 group round + 25 individual round) 63 were shortlisted for the next round which
was an HR interview.
Round 3: Round 3 was an HR interview in which common HR questions like 1.Why do
you want to join Barclays? 2. Are you comfortable with relocation across any location
in India? etc were asked in addition to the questions regarding the extracurricular
activities and strengths mentioned in my resume. Out of 63 students, they had given a
full-time offer to 40 students for the position of BA3(2020 Batch).
Verdict: Selected
1st round:
There was an aptitude test for 60 questions ranging from verbal reasoning, logical
reasoning and data interpretation, each section having 20 questions for mostly 60 –
75 minutes(I don’t remember exactly). And in the next 2 days, the results were
declared.
2nd round:
46 students were finally interviewed. There was a technical round and an HR round,
each being 30 minutes long.
In my technical round, the interviewer had asked me about myself, then enquired
about my mini-project(6 credits project in sem 6) and which all modules I had worked
on. Since I was also doing an internship during that time, he was interested to know
how I had managed my work.
Then, there were few basic technical questions thrown my way and if I had appeared
for any other company and how was their selection procedure and how their
procedure was different from theirs.
Furthermore, there were around 3 questions based on situations and how will I be
managing them in the company. Please make sure to be discreet in your answer and
justify your choice wisely.
Finally, came the HR round which almost everybody attended and was taken by the
Director and Vice President of Barclays India. The question was quite common for
everybody. Introduce yourself. Are your aware of Barclays’ virtues and which one of
them is close to you and justify using your life experiences?
After everybody’s interviews were over, the company had hired 19 people from my
campus and I was gladly one among them.
One piece of advice to all those who are about to sit in an interview is, DO NOT PANIC,
prepare yourself on how you will introduce yourself in minimal words and be thorough
with what you write on your resume. Also, read about the company for which you are
applying because that is a definite question to judge if the candidate is serious about
the job or not.
Happy hunting!
Round 1: First round was Aptitude test . It was held On CoCubes . The test was divides
into seperate 2 sections . First 1 hour for 60 Aptitude question and Next 1 Hour for
Coding .
The 60 Aptitude questions were divided as 20 Verbal + 20 Logical + 20 Quant .
You need to be very fast here . No negative Marking is there .
Coding Question
Everyone got the different set of questions . There were 2 codes to do in 60 min .
The codes were easy.
1 . find the count of elements in array whos difference from given num is less than
or equal to given diff .
int lessthandiff ( int [] arr, int num, int diff )
{
}
2 . find the sum of Kth small and Kth large element in array .
int sum ( int arr[] , int k)
{
}
Other codes as follows
1 . shift all the zeroes at the end of array
After this Round 15 people were shortlisted for next round.
Round 1
It was an online aptitude test( 60 questions 60 minutes ) on Cocubes platform.It had 2
parts.1st part was basic aptitude round consisting of three sections(20 questions
Each).
1. General English
2. Logical Reasoning
3. Quantitative Aptitude
The second part constituted of 2 simple programming questions (30 minutes). There
was no barrier of any programming language. Some of the questions were counted no
of words in a sentence, Lzma compression algorithm, array rotation, 2d matrix sort.
In all the questions you were just supposed to complete the function(template was
already provided and you were supposed to return specific arguments as mentioned
in question.
Selection criteria for the second round were based on both your aptitude +
Programming test. Make sure that you attempt as many questions in aptitude
round(no negative marking) and solve correctly at least 1 programming question
otherwise, you won’t be selected
Round 2
35 students were shortlisted for round 2. The company visited college a few days
later. A pre-placement talk was conducted early in the morning. The company will tell
you important stuff about them and on what technologies they work on. Jot down the
important points about the company and go through them before your Hr. Also, make
sure that you go through the company’s history at-least once.
After the pre-placement talk students were immediately called for interviews. Students
were told to just carry our Cv’s.
The technical interview focused only on what you mentioned on your resume. Make
sure that you don’t lie on it. Also, 5-6 behavioral questions were also asked. They will
put you in various situations and will note how you react to it. Be natural and try
thinking of whats the best thing you could have done in that situation. Take your time
the interviewer will have no issue on that. A mature answer is being expected from
you keeping aside all ego.
Round 3
16 students made through technical Round and were sent for HR. The HR will ask you
a few questions about the company(Its values RISES), you should be through with it.
HR will definitely ask you about these and how you see yourself following these values
in your real life.
15 students were finally selected.
Tips from my side
Make sure you know what company is working on.
Don’t lie on your resume and make sure you are through with it
Don’t take the aptitude test lightly and anwer maximum questions
Always show your confidence , and try not getting nervous while answering
Round 1: Online Test (90 minutes)
Test was taken on cocubes.com
96 people appeared for the online round. The test was quiet easy, it had 2
sections:
1. Aptitude Test(60 questions – 60 minutes)
It had aptitude questions ranging from permutation combinations, time
distance, similar image identification, syllogism and very easy verbal
questions.
Tip:
1. Solve quants first as it needs a little more time as compared to verbal and
logical.
2. Try to solve everything as there is no negative marking.
Resources: indiabix.com (last moment revision) and RS Agarwal book is enough.
2. Coding Test(2 questions – 30 minutes)
Both the questions were functional problems, so we just had to return the
modified output.
I don’t remember Question 1 correctly although it was memory based
basically a memory location in form of array is given we had to just perform
1 or 2 if else checks and the problem was done.
Question 2 was to sort a 2-d array.
The edge cases were weak and neither did they expect an optimised
approach. Simple brute-force approach did solve both the problems easily.
Tip: Don’t focus for optimizations in the code, whatever approach comes first in mind
apply it and solve it, try to solve both the questions, although some people who solved
one were also shortlisted for the next round.
Resources: According to me, geeksforgeeks.org only is enough not just for Barclays
but for any company that visits your campus. (Don’t go to any other website if your
placements are 1 or 2 months away, stick to geeksforgeeks)
Round 2: Technical + HR Interview (45-60 minutes)
After round 1, exactly 38 students were shortlisted for the interview process.
There was a pre-placement talk conducted before the interviews to inform
us about what the company does and all such stuffs. Each person had to
give his technical interview separately in different interview rooms.
My experience:
I greeted the interviewer and handed my resume to him. He asked me to tell
me about myself, where I live and all such basic questions.
He was quiet impressed by the fact that I had done my Diploma and got into
VJTI. So we had a discussion over it for around 5-10 minutes (why diploma
and why not degree all such stuffs)
Next, he started asking me questions about how much do you know SQL,
Java. He grilled me thoroughly over normalization, concurrency and SQL
Join queries from DBMS (tables were given, had to be normalised). Apart
from that he asked from the basics of Java like OOPS concepts, collections
framework (arraylist vs linkedlist, hashset vs treeset), what is garbage
collector why java needs it, multi-threading in java (what is thread pool why
is it needed, shutdown hook in java). Then he jumped over to situational
based question which was like:
I am a Barclays employee and I have been given a task on Monday whose deadline is
on Friday. Now if you have completed your coding upto Friday although you couldn’t
complete testing part, so how would you act in this situation. (Will you deploy the code
which isn’t tested without informing the lead or what other appropriate action will you
take)
Next he jumped back into technical again and asked me why set is preferred
over array and vice-a-versa, explain a real life scenario where-in you will use
array over set and set over array. Then he asked why mongodb is used, any
idea about PHP frameworks.
I constantly had related my ecommerce website project in different
questions, so he asked me how you will scale your ecommerce website for
large users, what techniques you will use. (Luckily I had studied a bit about
system design previous day told him the approach, he looked satisfied)
Lastly he asked me why Barclays and I was relieved finally the interview is
coming to end!
After that he asked do you have any question for me!!(Always be ready with
minimum 2 questions for the interviewer. Also remember not to ask the
similar question asked by other candidates, try to ask something different) I
had skimmed their website very well, written what I felt inquisitive,
questioning about Barclays products like Barclaycard and their services like
Contactless-cones, pingit etc. He seemed very impressed from my
questions and told me good you have done your homework very well!
Tip & Resources:
1. Once you enter interview room, don’t forget to close the door and ask
interviewer may I have a seat. Greet him with a handshake and wish him
a good morning as well.
2. Always before leaving the interview room ask the interviewer how did
you fare in the interview and ask him about the areas of improvement,
this leaves a good impression on interviewer and it makes him think
that we are definitely interested in improving ourselves.
3. For Barclays skim their website completely, literally jot down few points
from their history, their products, latest services etc.
4. The most important tip for Barclays is their Values RISES. Memorise
them, understand their meaning and try to relate it with some situation
in your life.
5. For technical preparation I would say:
1. DBMS: Sanchit Jain youtube channel.
2. SQL: practice nested queries and joins.
3. Java: geeksforgeeks.org, benchresources.net, oracle official docs.
4. System Design: gainlo blog, hiredintech.com, highscalability.com
blogs.
6. Learn to Say NO to interviewer, if you don’t know answer to any
question.
Round 3: HR Interview (20-30 minutes)
For final round we had around 20 students, here it was moreover an informal
discussion about ourselves and our willingness to join Barclays. I was again
asked a few questions on my resume, extracurricular activities and my
hobbies. It lasted for less time and he had again asked me few behavioural
questions. I answered them keeping in mind Barclays values. At last around
7pm results were announced and I was happy to be one to be selected
Note: Interviewers are smart and highly experienced, they easily catch you if
you say anything lame. Keep resume very simple and single paged resume is the
best, nobody cares about resume until you can speak and express your
thoughts properly. Don’t go for fancy resumes! Very important, don’t ever
screw up and say you want to go for higher studies or do an MBA , the
moment you say this you are out!
Lastly I want to add that just be yourself, keep smiling, have a good posture
while sitting, communicate well and hope for the best! Interview people are
normal humans, don’t be scared as they too one day were in same situation
as you are today. Be confident and don’t loose hope.
First Round
First there was an online test.
It consisted of one coding question and 6 sections including verbal, output
questions, aptitude questions etc. Worst thing about test was you cannot
navigate back to the question.
After that they shortlisted 30 candidates.
There were 3 rounds in total out of which first was a group activity. It was a non-
elimination round. We were divided into groups of 5 and were asked to build a house of
cards. It was fun. But there was a invigilator who was observing each of our activity,
how we work in a team etc.Then there was a technical round. My round went on around
60-80 min.
Next Round
First he asked me in detail about my recent project. He asked which technology I
used, what are advantages of this technology, what challenges I faced etc. Here I
would suggest you to deeply study whatever you are putting in your resume
because you should be able to answer reasonably whatever is given in your
resume.
Then he asked me to write a program to find greater of 2 dates with all if else
loops without any mistake.
Then he asked me to give a data structure to store when there are millions of
data and we want it to be search efficient. I told hashmap. Then he asked me
how hashmap is implemented.
Then he asked is there a better data structure to handle duplicates. I first
answered BST, but he said BST is mainly used when we want our to be in sorted
order which was right. I couldn’t think of any better data structure which I frankly
told him. He only answered this question. It’s answer is to use SETS.
Then he started asking about OOPS.
First he asked what is inheritance. I answered him with an example. Then he
asked about interface and why java doesn’t allow multiple inheritance.
Then he asked the term for redefining the function. I told him it’s called
overloading.
Then he asked me what is the difference between overloading and overriding. I
answered when we redefine the function in same class it’s called overloading but
when we redefine the function in derived class it’s called overriding.
He asked what are the constraints on arguments number and datatype in these
two cases. In overloading you can redefine the function with different number of
arguments and datatype but in overriding you cannot change it.
He asked can we have function overloading with different return types. I said no
as it is not allowed in either c++ or java.Actually it is allowed when the argument
list is changed
He asked what is third normal form which is DBMS question. This switch was so
sudden. But I answered him and he looked satisfied.
This was all from my technical interview. Then he asked me to wait outside. After half
an hour they called me for HR interview.
HR Interview
My HR interview was really good. First he asked me to tell about myself and asked my
family background.
Then he asked my how did I change myself after coming to college and how did I
improve my communication skills. (This question was because I mentioned that I had
my education till 10th in marathi medium).
He asked me about my hobbies and what is my passion.
There are 5 core values of barclays RISES (Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence,
Stewardship) which they really focus on. So I would suggest you to go through their site
before going for the interview.
He asked me how would you contribute to integrity.
Then he asked me if I have done some leadership roles.
He asked me how is my interaction with juniors.
Finally he asked if I have any questions.
After all interviews were over they announced the result and I was selected. I was really
happy. I would suggest everybody that whatever you will tell you should be confident
about it. In HR give an example for each of your statement because interviewer seems
satisfied if you provide an example showcasing your skills. Before going for the
interview go through your resume and be prepared to answer everything you have put
in your resume. I would suggest not to put something which you have never worked on
or you are not confident about because interviewers are experienced people who can
catch such things easily.