Campus recruitment drive in our college (September 2014) was conducted by Nvidia Pune. The profile being offered was of QA developer, but package wise it was the best company till date!
Criteria applied was of 65% and I was one of the fortunate few to clear that criteria by 0.95%!
Procedure of recruitment was straight forward- initial MCQ offline test for screening out candidates. (Pro tip: Aptitude test, apart from quantitative, included technical questions of C,C++,Data structures, Operating Systems. Do not prepare ONLY quantitative, as it had minor weight-age.)
Out of around 234 candidates, they selected 38 candidates for technical rounds(2) and HR round(1).
Typically, core companies have long, extensive interviews and as expected, my first technical round was of around 1.5 hours! I was expected to write code on paper and made to dry run it while handling each and every single exceptional case for the problem statement given. For most of the 1.5 hours, I was scribbling code onto paper and the interviewer patiently encouraged me to write each and every step. There were times where I had panicked and written spaghetti code, but the interviewer was satisfied upon hearing my explanation of the code (so I got that going for me, which is nice). After appearing for this interview, I thought I'd probably be spared off the second round, but I was called half an hour later immediately for the second round.
My second technical round was conducted by a very senior developer who was present during the company's presentation in the morning. I was a bit nervous, but fortunately, it was easy enough. Basic questions of Operating Systems were thrown rapid fire style, which I answered mostly to his satisfaction. A small puzzle regarding maps was asked, although I'm not sure if I gave a completely working solution to it. Fear of rejection was closing on to me after this interview was completed.
By 7.30pm, the results for the technical interviews were declared and only 4 candidates were asked to proceed for the HR round! I smiled to hear my name included in these 4, but the smile pretty much vanished for the ten minutes I was being interviewed. HR was particularly a weak area for me, but I survived it decently, answering all questions with confidence in my tone. A short while later, the results were declared and I was officially into Nvidia! :)
A point worth mentioning here: After declaration of the names of selected students, we were asked to give a thought as to accepting the job or not. The developers were right there to clear any of our doubts and they were more than willing to give us a few days time before we confirmed our approval. I don't know about the other companies, but I can pretty obviously see here how much importance Nvidia gives to its employees and their decisions.
