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Cerner Interview Experience | On-Campus 2020 (Virtual)
  • Difficulty Level : Medium
  • Last Updated : 16 Nov, 2020

The Hiring process of Cerner consisted of 4 rounds and the eligibility criteria was a minimum CGPA of 8.0, and they offered the role of Software Engineer and the job location is Bangalore.

Round 1(Verbal & Aptitude):

Aptitude: 30 Aptitude questions to be solved in 40 minutes MCQ’s. Questions spanned various topics such as:

  1. Time, Speed, and Work:
  2. Ratio and Proportion:   
  3. Partnership:
  4. Percentages:
  5. 2 puzzle based questions were also present

Verbal: 20 questions to be solved in 20 minutes. Questions were mostly general and included :

  1. Error Detection
  2. Passage Based  
  3. Fill in the blanks

Note: No negative marking in both verbal and aptitude.

Result: Qualified

Round 2(Coding): Cerner’s style of conducting coding round was probably the best I have come across in the entire placement season. This was not a usual coding round wherein a problem would be given and you need to solve it, pass multiple test cases, and then scored on the basis of it. They followed a unique method as mentioned below.

The process of the second round was as if you were speaking to an interviewer, but in this case, your camera is your interviewer. 7 questions would flash on the screen and you need to record your answer within a stipulated time period. Basically, THINK ALOUD. They were trying to understand how you were approaching a problem.

  • Questions 1: I was asked to discuss a problem that I faced during my projects and the way in which I handled in order to overcome it
  • Questions 2: A problem was given, and I was expected to discuss the way I would approach it
  • Questions 3: I had to implement my mentioned solution in an editor.
  • Questions 4: Don’t worry if you were not able to solve it, because question 4 is about the mistakes you made. Suppose your code did not pass the test cases, you were expected to identify the mistakes and rectify them and if it had passed the test cases, then good for you !

Questions 5,6 AND 7 ARE SAME AS 2,3 AND 4 with a different problem altogether.

So basically 2 Programming Questions which primarily focuses on the way you think to arrive at a solution.

Sample: Given an array of real numbers in an unsorted manner, find the number of ways in choosing 4 numbers such that their sum results in 0.

Input: [1,2,3,-6,-1,-2]
Output: 2 [ (1,2,3,-6) AND (1,2,-1,-2) ]

Note: You can record your answer only once for every question. No retakes!

Result: Qualified

Round 3(Technical + HR Interview): Since the videos of around 80-100 students had to be scrutinized, my interview call letter came after almost 3 weeks and around 30 students were shortlisted for the interview.

My interviewer began the interview by discussing the approaches I made for various problems during round 2. Logic, Time complexities, and Space complexities were discussed in detail. My Interviewer had actually analyzed my submissions from round 2 and had also gone through my resume thoroughly before interviewing me, and I was actually surprised to know it.  

He then directly jumped into the technical questions which were mostly from Java and OOPS concepts as I had mentioned Android, Data Structures and Cloud computing as my areas of interest. These were some questions from the interview :

  1. Explain every term in “public static void main ( String args[] )”
  2. Explain the term “System.out.println();”
  3. How is a java program compiled and run
  4. Explain about JVM
  5. Explain the various OOPS concepts
  6. Difference between Run-time Polymorphism and Compile-time Polymorphism
  7. How would you achieve Multiple Inheritance in Java?


I answered all the questions up to this point and the interviewer was happy with my answers. Then finally, he asked a programming question which is as follows :

Given an array of numbers in Arithmetic progression, one number would be missing in that array. Find that number.

This was a pretty easy question and I explained my logic clearly, and he was happy with it but while implementing the solution, out of nervousness, I made a blunder in indexing, and even after guidance from my interviewer, I happened to make 2 more mistakes and I was not able to produce the desired output.

He also fired a couple of usual HR Questions and my interview lasted a total of 90 minutes and told that further communication would be initiated by the company.

Result: Qualified

20 students were selected from across all 3 campuses for the role of Software Engineer. Apparently, my interview did not end there. Since the Interviewer felt that I was pretty good with my knowledge of Java, he had actually recommended 3 people for the role of Systems Engineers and I was one of them. I was informed this news by the Company’s HR team 3 days after the results of Software Engineer were published.

I had to attend another technical Interview for the role of Systems Engineers and this role demanded knowledge of Java, Operating Systems, and SQL.

Unlike the first technical interview, this interview lasted just 20 minutes and the following questions were asked :

  1. What is an AMI (Cloud Computing)
  2. How does S3 work and what are the other storage services you are aware of
  3. Write a query to concatenate First Name and Last Name from a Table.
  4. Write a query to display the second highest salary in a particular department
  5. Basic Java questions and HR questions

Result: Qualified

Round 4 (Versant Speaking & Written skills Test): This round is to check our fluency in speaking and writing skills in English. This was pretty much a basic test and you need to score a minimum cut-off to clear this round. Refer to the below-mentioned link on how the test would look like.

Result: Qualified

And finally, 2 days later, the results were announced, and I was Selected as a Systems Engineer and was offered an Intern and Full-time offer at Cerner.


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