How to prepare for ZS Associates

If you have come across portal subscriptions flashing job openings at ZS Associates, you probably have given a look at it. If your hands are itching to apply for it, you are in a right frame of mind.  ZS has hired regularly and remain largely unperturbed in market fluctuations.

The company recruits only from selected colleges across India and is at times selective on offering a particular profile to a specific college.

The hiring process of ZS Associates consists of 4 rounds:

1. Online Test
2. Case Study Interview
3.  Behavioral Interview
4. Personal Interview

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Online Test is conducted by Hirepro. In Online Test, they test the basic quantitative aptitude and logical reasoning of the candidate along with their English skills.

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In the case study, you will be asked to study a case for about thirty minutes and after the allotted time, you’ll be asked related questions. The interviewer will test your reasoning, your approach to process the given data to solve the problems. For example one of the case studies involved a case of a credit card company.

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The behavioral interview will consist of questions based on your projects, internships, extra-curricular and other things you provide in your resume. You can also expect few puzzles here and there in between and totally unexpected questions.

For example:  “So you like playing the synthesizer as a hobby. Could you give me an estimate of all the people in India who would own a synthesizer? Take out 5 minutes.”

How to answer it?!

The best part of such questions is that there is no perfect answer, and even the interviewer has no clue about it! The interviewer just wants to look at how you break down the problem at hand into bits and pieces, and come up with viable assumptions, and give intelligent guesses.

For the question on synthesizers, one candidate proceeded like this:

Assuming the country’s population is approximately 1.3 billion, and we keep hearing in the news that India has more than half of its population under 30. So just let’s assume that only young people will own a synthesizer, since such an instrument only started existing somewhere in the 90’s (I think). So the number now is 650 million. Now, a synthesizer is a pretty expensive equipment, and the average Indian can’t afford anything around 15-25 thousand on it. My assumption here is that India’s income per capita as per the latest census is around 3000 USD per year (PPP). Plus, music as a hobby is relatively expensive. Music lessons are pretty expensive, and unless someone is gifted like Mozart of Chopin, one must go through piano/keyboard lessons to develop this hobby.

Therefore, how many young people in India who are above middle class, and have a flair for music to buy a synthesizer? In the end, after further drilling down and cutting short to the final number, I managed to splutter out a number close to around 8 or 9 lac. 2 years down the line at the same job in the same company, I still don’t know the correct answer, but I’m happy that I managed to crunch my number down from 1.3 billion to 8-9 lac.

Key message here is that as an interviewee, try not to look fumbled at the case. Break it down into bits and pieces, and solve it piecemeal. 9 out of 10 times, the interviewer is not looking at your final answer, but how you get to the answer and what is your method in coming to the final answer.

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The final round (HR), which is the personal interview is conducted by a senior member at ZS Associates. Some of the questions which are asked in the final round are: Why do you want to join ZS Associates? How can you add value to ZS? Have you worked with data before? The idea here is to check your compatibility with the ZS culture. You should be pretty clear about your life vision and goals here to score well. As per the situation, you might even discuss career growth available for the role and future prospects.

That’s all folks. Believe in yourself and give it your best shot!

Best wishes from Team HireTale!