Interview Guide for Service-based Companies

Introduction

Service-based companies operate in a different way, especially compared to Product-based companies. A Service-based company does not focus on developing products to sell to end-users directly, rather, these kinds of companies focus on developing and sustaining custom services for their clients.

For instance, companies such as Cognizant, TCS, or Wipro generally build processes revolving around their clients and provide IT services to maintain these processes. These companies are also involved in business process outsourcing and provide the IT infrastructure, technical support, and skilled manpower for businesses to function effectively. 

Companies such as TCS, Infosys and IBM also put a lot of focus on teamwork, thus expecting their recruits to also work well within teams and have a stable mindset, which makes it less likely that they will switch.

Preparing For Service-based Companies

Service-based companies assess their potential employees with a lot of factors in mind. For example, they put a lot of emphasis on an applicant’s personality and team spirit. These companies select candidates on the basis of how great they will function in teams and how stable these individuals will be in the long run.

So, candidates must not only prepare all the probable interview questions that might get thrown at them but they must also ensure that they will be able to answer them with confidence and honesty. Preparing for these companies means that you must also adopt the service-based mentality that is required to function in large teams and within strict guidelines.

However, this is for the interviews and one needs to clear the aptitude and technical rounds as well. These are especially important as only by clearing these previous rounds will a candidate get the chance to sit for the HR or technical interviews.

Here are some general preparation tips to clear the entire selection or recruiting process:

• Sharpen your logical reasoning skills, quantitative aptitude and verbal ability.
• Try to solve problems under pressure as much as you can, especially under stipulated times in mock tests or mock interviews.
• Practise your coding skills by programming in Java, C++ or Python.
• Revise computing fundamentals such as OS, DSA, OOPS concepts and control statements.
• Practise writing cleaner code and solving middle-level to high-level coding problems.
• Work on your comprehension, vocabulary, synonyms and business communication.
• Revise mathematical concepts and other topics such as profit and loss or HCF and LCM.
• Practise from previous papers of exams conducted by Service-based companies.
• Learn the history of the company you are applying for and its business operations. For example, learn about the projects they are involved with and the IT services they provide.
• Sit for enough mock tests and mock interviews.

Interview Guide for Service-based Companies

After the aptitude tests and coding tests, candidates will need to sit for their technical interviews and HR interviews. Since we are focusing on interviews, let us discuss how these two interviews are conducted and how to sail through them.

First, let’s talk about the Technical Interview. This interview puts a lot of focus on your personal projects and other projects that you are associated with. Every technical interview session reserves a bit of time to discuss the candidate’s projects. In order to sail through this, you must be prepared enough to explain the core objectives of your project and what you learnt from it. You must also identify what are the mistakes that you have committed and how you will not repeat them.

You must be confident in the specifics of your project and be able to talk about how you could have done better or upscaled the project. It’s great to have a good portfolio deployed projects for this purpose so that it brings you more points in the interview. You must also ensure you talk about how you came upon the idea for the project and how to tackle the problems you faced when building it. Finally, you must explain how you have incorporated various systems and built the project. 

Next, you might be asked to estimate random facts such as the number of fish in the sea or the total weight of all the trees on this earth. This is just to check how capable your mind is to process ginormous numbers and if you can accurately predict the calculations these numbers involve. For example, taking an average of X number of fishers in 100 square metres of water, and then calculating the approximate number of fishers. The same goes for the weight of trees scenario.

In technical interviews, you might also be asked to write code on paper instead of compilers, thus, it is recommended that you practise writing clean code on paper. It is also advised you practise doing so in order to be able to do this fast and in an optimised, systematic manner. Depending on the job role, you might also be asked to design a system according to the requirements of the interviewer or like an existing app such as Swiggy or Telegram.

The HR interview comes next and for this, you must prepare in a different way. You must get your business communication skills on point and make your vocabulary as strong as possible. You must also sound confident and honest when you talk to the interviewer. Ensure that you come across as an honest person and that you are joining the company for the long run. Service-based companies are always looking for loyal employees who will stick around for a long time, thus bringing stability to the processes.

Treat the interviewers like your friend and do not stress when you are talking to them. You must also make sure that you answer every question in a positive way and never speak badly about your previous employers or company. Make sure you are identified as a positive person who will work well in teams and will bring positivity into the process that you are being interviewed for.

Coding Ninjas and the Service-based Companies Course

The service-based companies’ course features Arun Sharma, author of one of the best preparatory books for CAT. He is also an alumnus of IIM Bangalore and has been cracking CAT for more than 19 years with a 99.9% percentile. Arun Sharma will be in charge of the aptitude preparation of the students enrolled on this course. Other than that, Ankush Singhla, who is also a founder of Coding Ninjas and has experience working in Amazon and Facebook, will be heading the programming topics. Ankush Singhla is an alumnus of IIT Delhi and Stanford University.

The course will definitely help you crack service-based company recruitment drives and examinations such as NQT or ENTH with ease. Not only does the course help you with coding skills or programming languages, but also helps improve your quantitative aptitude and logical reasoning preparation.

Here are the programming topics that will be covered:

• Flowcharts
• Variables and Datatypes
• Conditional Statements
• While loops
• Patterns
• For loops
• Functions
• Introduction to Arrays
• Searching and Sorting
• Strings
• 2D Arrays

Here are the aptitude topics that will be covered:

• Introduction to Number System
• Progressions
• HCF and LCM
• Averages
• Alligations
• Percentages
• Ratio, Proportion and Variation
• Profit and Loss
• Time and Work
• Probability
• Permutation and Combination
• Introduction to Time, Speed and Distance
• Relative Speed
• Application of TSD
• Recognising Patterns
• Syllogisms
• Blood relation and calendars

Here are the English and logical topics that will be covered:

• Reading Comprehension
• Sentence completion/Fill in the blanks
• Vocabulary, Antonym and Synonyms
• Basic Concept of Data Interpretation
• Charts
• Log
• Mensuration

How Coding Ninjas Can Help?

After all the information above, if you are still in need of help and wondering how to prepare for Service-based companies, opt for Coding Ninjas. The Service-based course is specially designed by Coding Ninjas to ensure that you crack your Service-based company tests and interviews with ease. This course will prepare you with all the skills required for Service-based companies.

This course will prepare you for all the assessments and coding problems that you will face while also helping you with mock interviews and personalised domain-expert sessions. You can also avail the real-time doubt solving system Coding Ninjas has incorporated inside this course, which will allow you to get all the help from experts who have industry experience of more than 2 years and all the way up to 8 years.

Frequently Asked Questions

Key Takeaway

If we are talking about which is better, a Product-based company, or a Service-based company, service-based companies would always come out on top in terms of job stability and perpetual growth. Product-based companies offer growth as well and incredible salaries, however, Service-based companies work with tried-and-tested services and products that facilitate an incredibly stable professional life and various growth prospects inside the company’s long-term processes.