Hey everyone! I recently appeared for the Zoho off-campus drive held on April 4th, and I wanted to share my experience here. The drive saw a huge turnout of around 1500+ candidates, and by the end, only about 10–12 students were shortlisted. Though I couldn’t make it past the third round, I learned a lot and hope this post helps someone preparing for it in the future.
Recruitment Process Overview:
- Aptitude + Java Snippets
- Coding Round
- Low-Level Design (LLD)
Round 1: Aptitude + Java Snippets
This was the first and major filtration round.
1. Total Questions: 20
- 10 Aptitude Questions: Medium level (time, speed, probability, logical reasoning)
- 10 Java Code Snippet Questions: Tough and conceptually heavy
2. Duration: 75 minutes
3. Level: Tough
4. Shortlisted Candidates: Only 90–100 from 1500+
Tip: Make sure you’re strong in both logic-building and Java fundamentals. And yes, practice aptitude thoroughly — it was definitely the toughest round.
Round 2: Coding Round
This was a coding round with 7 questions of medium level.
Topics Included:
- Trees (e.g., Validate BST)
- HashMaps
- Arrays & Strings
- Sliding Window problems (both fixed and variable size)
Questions Asks:
- Validate BST
- length of longest substring having distinct characters
- Check palindrome
- FInd first missing Positive
- Number of substring having exactly k characters
- Find the first non repeating character in a string in 1 pass
Obstacles: Around 40–50 candidates cleared this round.
Tip: Focus on conceptual clarity and edge case handling. Practicing on platforms like GeeksForGeeks really helps here.
Round 3: Low-Level Design (LLD)
This round was unexpectedly challenging.
Design a Task Manager application, and the interview was structured in progressive steps:
- Starting from basic design
- Adding persistence using local file storage
- Handling multiple edge cases and improving functionality step by step
Obstacles: Only 10–15 students made it to the next technical face-to-face round mostly all of them got selected ig.
Additional Tips
- Prepare well for Aptitude: This is the most difficult and most important round.
- LLD Practice is essential: Go beyond just DSA.
Get Comfortable with online IDEs: You'll be expected to code in them during interviews. - Stay Consistent and Positive: Even if it doesn't work out, every experience counts.
Final Outcome
Unfortunately, this is where my journey ended. Despite performing decently, I wasn’t shortlisted after LLD. I noticed that most of the candidates selected for the next round were from Tamil Nadu, and while it may have been coincidence, I felt there may have been some bias — especially considering that a few others and I implemented almost the same solutions as some of the selected candidates.
But that’s life — sometimes it's about more than just the code.