ITC's Agri Business Division Interview Questions and Answers

Round: Group Discussion
Experience: Almost the entire group went off topic confusing commercialisation with privatisation. Inspite of HR manager's intervention regarding misinterpretation , group continued with privatisation.
Tips: Technical firms are not expecting high level of GD & communication skills (except when the profile demands so) . You are expected to atleast be able to keep your view point with some logical support.
If you are able to raise 2-3 points in a polite way , you are highly likely to be selected.
If the GD you are appearing is for a profile like marketing , sales or where end to end interaction matters much , u need to be highly skillfull at your communication.

Skill Tips: You must be able to relate your text book knowledge with the practical world. Focus on the applications of whatever you study.
Skills: Design Engineering, Team Leader, Team Player
College Name: NIT Jalandhar

Round: Test
Experience: Coding part was very difficult. Ultimately, I landed up with a job on Samsung.
Duration: 45+45+45 minutes

College Name: IIT KANPUR

Round: Test
Experience: 1. It was 3 hours test with three 'subjective' sections of one hour each.
2. The first section was mathematics, comprising of Probability Statistics and Linear Algebra. Apparently, one of the sum was from one of the previous IMO papers. All the sums were more or less pretty theoretical and high level.
3. The second section was algorithms, which is where I performed best, since I was taking the Data Structures and Algorithms course that semester.
4. The third section was on computer networks which was mainly targeted at the CSE junta and not meant for us.
Duration: 180 minutes
Total Questions: 60+60+60

Round: Interview
Experience: 1. It lasted for 20-30 minutes.
2. This was my first interview of the day. It started off with a discussion of my resume, especially of my work at DB, and the interviewer even told me about how they do something quite similar in their team.
3. He asked me about my courses and my interest in finance.
4. The discussion then moved towards finance and we discussed questions like why are gold prices increasing and why are US treasury bonds still valuable and also about the Euro crisis.
5. I call it a discussion because although it would start off with a question the interviewer would pose for me, very soon it would end up being an interesting discussion with each of us putting in our opinion and views and new facts. It was a very jovial interview.

Round: Interview
Experience: 1. This was supposed to be a more technical interview to test my coding and mathematical skills.
2. The interviewer asked me if I knew C++. I told him that I had done it back in my high school days, so might be a little rusty but will definitely try.
3. He started off with an easy question on derived classes and their objects. Soon the code became more and more complicated, involving abstract classes, virtual functions, copy constructors etc.
4. However, thankfully I was able to answer at every step, sometimes of course with a little nudge from him.
5. Later in second question, he modified the question by making it an unfair coin. He taught me how to draw a state diagram, and using that I was easily able to reach the answer.
6. After this I had left for the BCG ordeal so had been unable to come back for my third interview that they kept calling me for. I finally came back to meet them after giving my 1st round interview at Credit Suisse. I was asked about my job preferences and if I was really interested in joining GS.
7. After I assured them that GS is indeed my dream company they let me know that all of them were pretty impressed with me and in other ways subtly hinted at the good news. When I came out of that room, my prior two interviewers came over to chat with me. We moved into another room and had a long chat about their plans for the India office of GS, the new teams they were planning to build etc. One of them gave me his business card, asking me to give him a call if I had any more questions.

General Tips: 1. I really wanted to get into Goldman Sachs so I started reading the Financial Express on the side, and practicing probability problems from “50 challenging problems in probability”, a book suggested by one of the alums in investment banking.
2. The preparation for CAT had taken care of my aptitude test preparation so I did not have to worry much about that any longer.
3. I didn't have to worry about Group Discussions because not too many companies open for BSBE conducted GD’s.
4. I had left the last week after my endsems ended and before placements began for the main preparation for HR although I did make a list of questions and jotted down some points for the answers of each of them beforehand.
5. Initially, I would practice around 3 case studies a week, with my batchmates in GH, in a group of 4. We would meet at night whenever possible and each one would solve one case study each while another person posed as the interviewer, usually from the book “Case in Point” but sometimes also from other sources like the IIMA Case Book, the Wharton Business School Case book and the cases that had come in previous years’ problems which we found in SPO’s Case book.
6. In later days, especially during endsems, we took to meeting in mixed random groups among the BCG shortlisted people for similar case practice sessions, and I ended up having done around 20 case studies before placements started.
7. Once the shortlist for Goldman Sachs came out, which was 2 days before the placements, I also read up a little on dynamic programming which I knew nothing about.
8. In the last week before placements I structured my HR answers and learnt by heart the main points so that I don’t miss any when answering, but not the language because I believed spontaneity is a must to excel in HR interviews.
College Name: IIT KANPUR

Round: Test
Experience: I kind of knew how to do all the questions but made a calculation mistake in two qs. Apparently, they shortlisted only those who scored above a certain cutoff (which was high).

1. Given a pointer to the head of a linked list, insert a new node at the end of the list in constant time.

2. Print permutations of a set of integers

3. Standard deviation of length of a chord from a point on a circle in a random direction.

4. Find derivative of f?1(x) at x = 0 given f(x) = Rx

3 (t4 + t3 + t2 + t)dt (use the fact that f?1(f(x)) = x and differentiate both sides)

5. What is the probability that 7m + 7n is divisible by 5 if probability of m being odd is twice as m’s probability of being even and similarly n is thrice as likely to be even than odd. (find the probabilities of m,n being even and odd, then takes each case and find the probability that in each case 7m + 7n ends with a 5 or 0 by taking all possible last digits of 7m and 7n)

6. Function that returns 1 if input binary tree is a binary search tree without using any assignment statements, loops, arithmetic operations in the function. (obviously you use recursion. They defined a BST so you needn’t even have remembered what it was).
Duration: 2 hrs minutes

College Name: IIT KANPUR

Round: Test
Experience: It was a test checking your logical reasoning with three subjective questions on Probability and three on general algorithm of programming. They were checking our quantitative ability and programming skills as well.

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: It was a technical interview in which they started with asking some basic questions on probability such as Moment-generating function of Normal distribution, one algorithm problem and one problem from signal processing. I could not do the last one but rest all went fine.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: It was an HR interview. They enquired about my programming skills, career interests and future plans.

General Tips: I took it for granted that being from a non-CSE dept they won’t be ask me questions from OOP and related concepts (like Polymorphism and Virtual functions). However, they expected the candidate to be well aware of all that.
College Name: IIT KANPUR

Round: Test
Experience: Test was mainly based on probability and algo, with some algebra, integration and puzzles. Some questions were on OS and database for CS people.
Duration: 60 minutes

Round: Test
Duration: 60 minutes

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: First round was all about probability, algo and tricky mathematical problems, The key was to take your time, keep talking about your approach and try to see if the interviewer gives away any hints.
Tips: Be enthusiastic during the interview. Your enthusiasm matters more than your answer.

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: The second round was similar to the first round.

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: The third was a discussion on projects. I told them about my interest in following markets.

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: In the fourth round, the interviewer explained the various teams that had come to recruit and asked a question about BST.

Round: Other Interview
Experience: The fifth round was just to check which profile would interest me. When I told him that I was interested in a combination of algo and math, he himself told that the quant profile would be the best for me.

General Tips: Prepare your resume in advance, with ample revision. Make them company specific if possible by talking to alumni.
Prepare according to the company requirements.
College Name: IIT KANPUR
Motivation: I got interested in Quant jobs that help integrate technical knowledge with finance. Hence this was my first choice.