Advisory Board Interview Process

I applied for the position of Software Engineer at Advisory Board in person. At a certain point of time I felt that they were not having interviews but then I was reverted back after three weeks and informed about the interview. The interview had five rounds in total - four technical rounds and one HR round.

Round 1 - Face to Face Interview
The very first round was pretty tiring. By tiring am referring to the fact that so many questions were asked. But before beginning with the technical questions, some of the basic things were asked from me. They inquired about my technical background and the reasons why I was switching the company. They tested my communication skills and adaptability to the work environment and team work through several questions.

After all such questions was the time for some technical questions. The questions were overall basic in nature. I don't remember all of them but I am giving away some which were asked from me:
Q1. Difference between ASP.Net Web Forms and MVC.
Q2. Difference between structural programming and object oriented programming.
Q3. Explain the Big-O-notation.

Round 2 - Telephonic Interview
This was a telephonic discussion round and I was called from the Chennai Office. The level of questions asked was intermediate. The interviewer asked me about my strong area and the questions followed surrounding that area only. Questions were asked over the object oriented programming concepts. A couple of questions on the practical application of the abstract class and interfaces were asked as well. Some questions were based on SQL server DML.

The round was as I said moderately difficult. I you know your basics, you can do well.

Round 3 - Second Telephonic Interview
This time, I was called straight from Washington DC. The level of questions asked was advance in this round. Some questions were quite difficult and most of them were situation based technical questions. They also asked questions to test my analytical and reasoning skills. You can expect questions related with language integrated query and the technologies that Microsoft is working on i.e. Windows 9 and mobile OS.
Q1. Write a function that accepts an integer and returns the number 1's after converting it to its corresponding binary format.
Q2. How can you improvise over the code you have just written?

Round 4 - Third Telephonic Interview
This was another telephonic discussion via Washington DC. You will find that this round is pretty much similar to the one you had given already. The questions are advanced and difficult just the same way. Although in this round, they will be measuring your thinking skill more than your technical skills. Some of the questions asked:
Q1. Write a function that returns a Boolean and accepts:
a)An array of integer
b) An integer, say 'x'

Q2. Consider that an SQL table contains two fields - Product and Category. The table is populated with some sample data i.e.
Product Category
Mango Fruit
Strawberry Fruit
Milk Diary
Banana Fruit
Cabbage Vegetable
Then, write an SQL query that will return the Category which has the maximum existence. (It should return fruit in this case as they have maximum occurrence).

Round 5 - HR Interview
After I was passed over the telephonic rounds, I was called for the HR interview. It was a usual round with all sorts of Human Relations type questions some of which I had already answered in the previous technical rounds. After all that, they asked me for my expected CTC. There was no negotiation required as what they offered was higher than my expected CTC. I was glad that I was finally selected.

How to crack (get into) Advisory Board Interview

Cracking Advisory Board interview is not at all an easy task. I have tried my best to explain all the rounds in details above only and thus I would like to keep this section as brief as possible.

If you ask me, I will say that you have to read each and everything in detail and practice over the coding as much as you can. You can't really guess from where they will ask you the questions. It is relatively easy to crack the first two rounds. But for the Washington calls, you better be prepared with your best. These are professional people who want only professional people. If they get a hint that you are an amateur by any chance, you are likely to be rejected.

So the key to crack Advisory Board Interview is to prepare for the worst and then give your best during the interviews. There is no alternative.

My best wishes are with the candidates preparing or appearing in the interviews in coming future.