Role: Report Analyst (Intern), Business Analyst (Full Time Job)
College: Not Specified
Interview Date: 2017-09-20
Interview Type: On-Campus
Result: Selected
Difficulty: Medium
Rounds: 3 rounds (Online Test, Two F2F Interviews)
Topics Asked: English, Reasoning, Aptitude, Resume Discussion, Projects, DBMS, SQL Queries, Java, Puzzles, Guesstimates
Experience:
This interview experience for EXL Analytics was for both Report Analyst (Intern) and Business Analyst (Full Time Job) roles, conducted on-campus.
1st Round: Online Test (on CoCubes)
- The test had 40 questions and a duration of 45 minutes, with sectional cut-offs.
- English: Paragraph Formation (Re-arrangement), Idioms & Phrases, Selecting Words, Completing Statements, Comprehension.
- Reasoning: Figure matrix, Pattern Completion, Sitting Arrangement, Venn diagram, Data Sufficiency.
- Aptitude: Time & Work, Problems on Trains, Height & Distance, Ratio Proportion, Alligation or mixture, Percentage, Logarithm, Permutation & Combination, Probability, Data Interpretation (most important topic).
- Tips included reading directions carefully for DI problems and using approximate values for calculations.
2nd Round: Technical Interview (F2F)
- "Tell me something about yourself."
- Questions about differences between cities (Kurukshetra and Indore).
- Discussion on approaches used to counter Data Interpretation problems.
- Questions about projects, including those not mentioned in the resume.
- Explanation of a mini-project and why RDBMS was not used as a database.
- Difference between RDBMS and Graph Database, and why Neo4j was preferred.
- A guesstimate question about the approximate number of people required to implement planning and expected participation, with calculations based on city population.
- DBMS questions: Joins, Normalization.
- SQL queries: Find total rows with branch 'MCA', implement left/right join, is it possible to join two tables without a WHERE clause, pre-defined functions of SQL, difference between aggregate and scalar functions, write queries using UCASE, LEN, AVG, LAST, implement case-insensitive search.
- Two puzzles were asked: How to cut an equilateral triangle into 4 equal equilateral triangles (easy), and how many squares are there on a chessboard.
3rd Round: Technical Interview (F2F - described as part of 2nd/3rd round in another similar experience for the same date)
- The interviewer asked about the candidate's favorite language (C, C++, Java, Python).
- 4-5 questions from Java, including writing code to make a calculator.
- Multiple questions from projects mentioned on the resume, and questions related to the project.
- DBMS questions: Normalization (1st, 2nd, 3rd NF), Join, writing SQL commands using AND and OR.
- Puzzles: Form 24 using 8 8 3 3.
- HR questions: Why join EXL, why interested in EXL, hobbies, questions related to sports (if interested).
- A puzzle involving measuring 5 liters of water using 4-liter and 7-liter buckets.
- General Java questions after solving a coding problem in Java.
- Discussion on applying different types of joins on two given tables.
- "Any question you want to ask?"
Overall Experience: The candidate was selected after these rounds.