Explore: Interview experience · HR interview questions · Overview · Placement papers · Preparation guide
CGI runs a classic IT-services funnel - aptitude-heavy OA, resume-anchored technical rounds, HR close - but larger drives split the technical stage into two rounds of increasing depth rather than one.
Interview experience
CGI interview experiences covering Online assessment (AMCAT-style), Group discussion (some drives), Technical interview 1, Technical interview 2 (larger drives), +1 more. Round-wise notes, common questions, and what candidates report clears each stage.
HR interview questions
CGI HR interview questions with sample answer frameworks - motivation, relocation, STAR stories, and culture-fit prompts.
| Round | Duration | What they test |
|---|---|---|
| Online assessment (AMCAT-style) | - | Quant aptitude, verbal, technical MCQs (Java/SQL/OOPs), 1-2 coding problems, sectional cutoffs |
| Group discussion (some drives) | - | Communication, teamwork, articulation |
| Technical interview 1 | 30-45 min | OOPs, collections, tree/graph traversal, resume project |
| Technical interview 2 (larger drives) | 30-45 min | Pattern printing, Tries, Linux internals, deeper CS fundamentals |
| HR interview | ~30 min | Career history, motivation, team fit |
These answers are compiled from public candidate reports and prep guides, not from an official notice, and drives differ. The instruction screen of your own test is the final word.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| How many questions and how long? | Not fixed. PrepInsta describes 4-5 sections depending on the profile: quant, logical reasoning, verbal ability, computer programming and coding. One prep page lists 16 quant, 22 verbal, 8 business analytics, 26 computer science and 2 coding questions; that may be an older pattern. Some 2025 campus drives ran a single online coding test instead. |
| Does it have negative marking? | No, by most prep guides and candidate reports. AMCAT-based tests do not deduct marks for wrong answers. |
| Is there a sectional cutoff? | Yes on some drives. Candidates report needing to clear each module, not only the total. CGI does not publish the cutoffs. |
| How much is the cutoff? | Not published. Eligibility is commonly 60% in Class 10 and 12 and 65% in B.E. or B.Tech, with no backlogs when you apply. |
| Which platform is it on? | Usually AMCAT (Aspiring Minds) on campus drives, sometimes with AMCAT Automata for coding. Check your invite mail. |
| Is there coding? | Yes. Usually 1-2 problems (reported ones include frequency sorting and merge sort); one older campus drive ran a six-problem programming test. Use C, C++, Java or Python as the platform allows. |
| Is there a GD? | On some campus drives, between the test and the technical interview. Several 2025 drives skipped it. |
The technical interview follows your resume and the role on your mail. These are questions candidates have reported on Glassdoor; they show the level and style, not a fixed list.
| Role | Reported questions and topics |
|---|---|
| Associate Software Engineer (campus, Java-led) | Mostly Java: OOP pillars, the Object class, collections, stacks and queues, tree traversals, multithreading basics, and SQL queries with joins. Every question tied to what is on your resume. |
| Associate Software Engineer (non-CS or no CS projects) | Basic CS subjects as listed on the CV: OS, data structures and algorithms, DBMS, binary search and hashing. |
| Software developer (full-stack, 2025) | Basic Java and React questions with short coding tasks in both stacks. |
| Cloud or infrastructure-leaning roles | What Kubernetes is, containerisation architecture, and why companies move to the cloud. |
Asked across every role: your project, the technologies you list and your own contribution, why CGI, and which role and location you are open to.
A proctored, often AMCAT-style test run in modules - quant aptitude, verbal ability/English, and a coding section with sectional cutoffs on some drives, alongside technical MCQs on Java, SQL, and OOPs.
Common questions
When included, a short discussion round on a general or current-affairs topic to gauge communication clarity and how you hold your position in a group setting, before the technical interviews.
Common questions
The first technical round centers on OOPs and Java collections fundamentals plus your resume project; when a drive runs a second round, it goes noticeably deeper into data structures and systems topics.
Common questions
Full technical narratives are on the CGI interview experience page.
A closing conversation on job role and location fit, family background, and motivation for CGI - on at least one report, folded into the same panel as the final technical discussion rather than run as a separate step.
Common questions
Sample answer frameworks for each of these are on the CGI HR interview questions page.
Not every CGI drive is the same depth - smaller drives often close the technical stage in a single round on OOPs and your resume project, while larger campus drives (reportedly funnelling 85 shortlisted candidates down to 16 offers) add a second, harder technical round on pattern printing, Tries, and Linux internals. If your drive is large, budget prep time for genuinely deeper DS/systems topics beyond basic OOPs - the bar rises noticeably between round one and round two.
CGI on this page is CGI Inc., the Montreal-headquartered IT services and consulting company that hires freshers in India as Associate Software Engineers and Software Developers. It is not CGI in the film and games sense (computer-generated imagery); if you are preparing for a 3D animation or VFX artist interview, this page will not help.
This page covers CGI’s fresher hiring in India: the AMCAT test, technical interview and HR round.
PapersAdda and placement guides stress SQL plus client-delivery fit over Hard DSA.
Framework: Speed on aptitude, accuracy on JOINs and OOP. Easy coding when present.
Framework: Write a JOIN live, walk a project bug, answer OOP pillars. Mainframe topics only if the posting is mainframe-adjacent.
Framework: What you do if a ticket arrives late evening: acknowledge, triage, escalate with facts. Consulting delivery signal.
Framework: Turn-taking, Why CGI (global consulting delivery), relocation and shifts for global clients.
Object is the implicit root of the Java class hierarchy - any class that does not explicitly extend another silently extends Object, which guarantees a common set of methods on every reference type. Those methods are equals, hashCode, toString, getClass, clone, finalize, and the threading trio wait, notify and notifyAll. This universality is what makes collections work: a HashMap can store any object because it can always call hashCode and equals on it. The contract interviewers test is that equal objects must return the same hashCode - if you override equals without overriding hashCode, two logically equal keys land in different buckets and your HashMap lookup silently fails.
ArrayList is backed by a resizable array: get by index is O(1), but inserting or removing in the middle is O(n) because elements shift, and growth copies into a larger array. LinkedList is a doubly linked list: add or remove at either end is O(1), but get by index is O(n), so it only wins when you mutate the ends heavily. HashMap stores key-value pairs in buckets by hash, giving O(1) average get and put, degrading to O(log n) in modern Java once a bucket converts from a list to a tree. HashSet is simply a HashMap where all values point at a dummy object, so it gives O(1) contains but no ordering - use LinkedHashSet to preserve insertion order or TreeSet for sorted order at O(log n).
Keep an input stack and an output stack. Enqueue always pushes onto the input stack in O(1). Dequeue checks the output stack: if it is empty, pop every element from input and push it onto output, which reverses the order so the oldest element is now on top, then pop from output. Each element is moved at most twice across its lifetime, so dequeue is O(1) amortised even though a single dequeue can cost O(n). The mistake interviewers look for is transferring on every dequeue rather than only when the output stack is empty, which makes every operation O(n).
Inorder visits left subtree, node, then right subtree, and on a binary search tree it emits the keys in sorted order, which is how you verify a BST. Preorder visits node, left, then right, and is used to serialise or clone a tree because the root arrives before its children. Postorder visits left, right, then node, and is used for deletion and for evaluating expression trees, since children must be handled before the parent. All three are O(n) time with O(h) stack space, where h is the height - O(log n) balanced, O(n) in the worst case. Level-order is the fourth traversal and needs a queue rather than recursion.
Dijkstra finds the shortest path from one source to every other vertex in a graph with non-negative edge weights. It maintains a distance array initialised to infinity except the source at zero, and repeatedly extracts the unvisited vertex with the smallest tentative distance from a min-heap, relaxing each of its outgoing edges by checking whether going through the current vertex beats the stored distance. With a binary heap it runs in O((V + E) log V). It fails on negative edge weights because once a vertex is finalised it is never revisited, so a later negative edge could have improved it - that is when you switch to Bellman-Ford at O(V*E). Practical uses are network routing, map navigation, and any least-cost pathfinding.
A Java thread moves through NEW, RUNNABLE, BLOCKED, WAITING, TIMED_WAITING and TERMINATED states, and you create one by implementing Runnable rather than extending Thread, since Java allows only single inheritance. Calling start() spawns a new thread of execution, while calling run() directly just executes on the current thread - a classic trap question. The synchronized keyword makes a method or block mutually exclusive on an object monitor, and volatile guarantees visibility of a variable across threads without providing atomicity, so a volatile counter increment is still unsafe. In production code prefer the java.util.concurrent utilities - ExecutorService for pooling, AtomicInteger for lock-free counters, and ConcurrentHashMap - over hand-rolled synchronized blocks.
A Trie, or prefix tree, stores strings by character along tree edges, so all words sharing a prefix share a path, and each node carries a flag marking the end of a word. Search, insert and delete are O(L) where L is the word length, independent of how many words are stored - a HashMap is also roughly O(L) because it must hash the whole string, so raw lookup is not the reason to choose a Trie. The real advantage is prefix operations: listing every word starting with a given prefix is a single walk plus a subtree traversal, which a HashMap cannot do without scanning every key. That makes Tries the right structure for autocomplete, spell-checkers, and IP routing tables, at the cost of higher memory - compress with a radix tree if that matters.
For employees and departments: SELECT e.name, d.dept_name FROM employees e INNER JOIN departments d ON e.dept_id = d.dept_id; INNER JOIN returns only matching rows in both tables. LEFT JOIN returns every row from the left table with NULLs where the right has no match, which is how you find orphan records by adding WHERE d.dept_id IS NULL. RIGHT JOIN is the mirror image, and MySQL has no FULL OUTER JOIN, so you emulate it with a UNION of the left and right joins. The performance point interviewers probe is that the join column should be indexed on both sides, otherwise MySQL falls back to a nested-loop scan of the inner table for every outer row.
Classic CGI panel question: use GROUP BY department_id with MAX(salary), or a window function ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY department_id ORDER BY salary DESC) and filter row number 1. Without window functions, a correlated subquery or join on (dept_id, max_salary) works. Interviewers follow up on tie-breaking and indexing on (department_id, salary).
Use inheritance when subtype is-a supertype and you need polymorphic behaviour shared across instances (e.g. PaymentMethod → CardPayment). Use a static utility when behaviour is stateless and shared verbatim (e.g. JSON parsing helpers) - composition over inheritance avoids fragile base classes. CGI interviewers often ask this after OOP pillars to see if you can apply them to resume projects.
No, according to most prep guides and candidate reports. The CGI test is usually run on AMCAT, which does not deduct marks for wrong answers, so attempt every question. Check the instruction screen of your own test.
CGI does not publish one, and some drives apply sectional cutoffs, so you need to clear every module. Eligibility is commonly 60% in Class 10 and 12 and 65% in B.E. or B.Tech, with no backlogs when you apply.
CGI’s fresher hiring for Software Developer roles usually runs three to four stages: a proctored online test (often AMCAT-style, in modules covering quant aptitude, verbal ability, and coding, sometimes with sectional cutoffs) covering technical MCQs on Java/OOPs/SQL; one or two technical interviews (about 30-60 minutes each); and a closing HR interview. Some drives add a group discussion before the technical rounds.
Technical interviewers stay close to your resume - expect detailed questions on the projects and technologies you list, plus OOPs fundamentals (Object class, collections, stacks/queues, tree traversal), basic SQL/MySQL queries, and live coding or debugging on a shared screen. A second technical round, when there is one, can go deeper into data structures (Trie, pattern printing) or core topics like Linux internals. The HR round is behavioural and culture-focused: career history, why CGI, and what kind of team environment you prefer.
CGI typically runs 3-4 rounds: an online assessment, one or two technical interviews, and a final HR interview. When the OA has sectional cutoffs, you need to clear every section, not just the overall score, to advance.
It can, especially on larger campus drives. One reported drive ran a first technical round on OOPs and collections fundamentals (Object class, stacks/queues, tree traversal, Dijkstra’s algorithm, multithreading) followed by a second round going deeper into pattern printing, Tries, and Linux internals - only a fraction of the 85 shortlisted candidates converted to offers.
Revise Java, SQL, and OOPs fundamentals (especially collections and tree/graph traversal) along with quant aptitude, practise structured group-discussion participation if your drive includes one, and be ready to explain your academic projects in depth - the technology choices, your specific role, and the challenges you solved.
Campus technicals commonly emphasise SQL, OOP, and projects more than Hard graph problems. Timed aptitude still filters many candidates.
Yes through campus and off-campus channels (including Njoyn postings). Confirm eligibility and location on the specific requisition.
Good fit: You like client delivery (not only building your own app), you can write SQL without Stack Overflow, and you will relocate. Consulting branding is real in HR; day-one work is still a project team.
Harder path: You only grind LeetCode hard; you refuse shifts; you cannot explain a JOIN. CGI technicals are not Bar Raiser. They are “can we staff you on a bank/gov/telecom account.”
Use this as a default four-week loop before a CGI drive. Adjust to your invite timeline.
10-day crash version: Days 1-4 timed DSA, days 5-7 resume projects + CS fundamentals, days 8-9 mock interviews out loud, day 10 HR STAR stories on the HR page.
Candidate-reported fresher/early-career packages for CGI often cite ₹4.5-7 LPA candidate-reported. Treat forum numbers as ranges, not guarantees - confirm the written offer letter for your team and location.
Interview process details and sample questions on this site are editorially organized from public candidate reports and hiring write-ups, with round structure, prep notes, and company-specific framing added by our team. For round-by-round stories, see the CGI interview experience page. For OA papers and coding drills, use CGI on placementpapers.app. OA quick answers and role-wise questions draw on PrepInsta’s CGI recruitment page, Hitbullseye’s CGI test pattern page, a KL University CGI campus notice and CGI Glassdoor interview reviews from 2015-2025.
