1️⃣ Application & Shortlisting
✔️ What happens:
You apply on LinkedIn / Naukri.
Recruiter screens your resume for:
SQL skills
Data cleaning + reporting
Excel, Power BI
Past projects
Communication
✔️ If shortlisted:
Recruiter calls you and says:
“Hi Amit, this is ___ from ___. I saw your profile and wanted to schedule an interview for the Data Analyst/SQL Developer role.”
2️⃣ HR Screening Call (10–15 minutes)
This call only checks:
Can you communicate properly?
Are you stable?
Are you genuine?
Salary & notice period?
✔️ Typical questions:
Tell me about yourself.
Tell me about your experience at your previous company.
What database technologies have you used?
Why are you looking for a change?
What is your current CTC, expected CTC?
Notice period?
Are you comfortable with office timing/location/WFH?
If you clear, HR books Technical Round 1.
3️⃣ Technical Round 1 (45–60 minutes)
This round is mostly SQL + basic data analytics + scenario-based questions.
✔️ They check:
SQL Joins
GROUP BY, HAVING
Window Functions
Query Optimization
Stored Procedures
Indexing
Data Cleaning logic
Excel → VLOOKUP, Pivot
Power BI basics
✔️ Example Questions:
Write a query to find second highest salary.
Difference between WHERE and HAVING.
Use window function to calculate running total.
How to optimize a slow query?
What is normalization?
What are clustered & non-clustered indexes?
If this is cleared → You move to Technical Round 2.
4️⃣ Technical Round 2 (Case Study Round) (45–60 minutes)
This is more practical.
✔️ They give tasks like:
Analyze a dataset
Create SQL queries
Explain how you’ll build a report
Write an end-to-end data cleaning pipeline
Debug SQL queries
✔️ They may ask:
“You have 3 tables: orders, customers, payments…write a SQL to find top 5 customers by revenue.”
“How will you calculate retention rate?”
“Explain a complex project you did.”
If cleared → Managerial Round.
5️⃣ Managerial / Hiring Manager Round (30–40 minutes)
This round checks:
How you work with teams
Ownership
Real project experience
How you handle deadlines
Communication & attitude
Problem-solving approach
✔️ Typical questions:
“Explain your role in your previous company.”
“How do you deal with pressure?”
“Tell me about a challenge you solved.”
“If we assign you a difficult dataset, how will you approach it?”
“What value can you add to our team?”
“Tell me about a time you optimized a query in real project.”
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Chegg (New Delhi) in Sept 2021
Interview
My profile - 4 years of experience in various AWS tools, Python, Spark, SQL and data engineering works.
Applied through Glassdoor and LinkedIn simultaneously.
Subsequently, got a call from the recruiter and then first round of interview was scheduled.
Got through it.
Second round(with Senior Data Engineer/ Team Lead) - Got through it.
Third round - with Manager.
Then got a call from the recruiter that the position they were hiring for - someone else got hired
The recruiter at the same time gave me a choice whether I want to go for Data Platform Engineer - II job as they found my profile and skills to be relevant to that too.
Went for it and another managerial round happened in which within 15 minutes I was told that they wanted an expert guy.
The role was -> Dev Ops + Ops in Data Engineering
But if you look at the JD of Data Engineer-II and Data Platform Engineer-II it's almost the same.
Finally, got the generic reply - proceeding with another candidate or so...End!
And after that the recruiter also didn't pick the call.
4 rounds mean approx 4 hours of my precious time got completely wasted.
Pathetic experience!
Advice to Chegg:
Get your hiring team and managers in sync. Also, try respecting time of candidates too. It's not a playground.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Chegg (Santa Clara, CA) in Feb 2013
Interview
I was referred by an employee, I already know about the hiring manager thru a connection. I was directly asked to come for in-person interview after discussion with recruiter. I met 3 folks including the hiring manager. First 2 was cool more like a discussion. Third was the team lead, it went well initially but I was asked to write code for a simple problem. But I wasn't prepared and I was stumped. I can sense that it didn't went well. I also did some mistakes like not explaining my thought process etc.,
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Here are the questions.
1. How will you run shell script on remote server
2. Different SQL ways of getting time spent info from call lag data (lead-lag query)
3. Data modeling for high volume click stream data
4. Write a program to find the value for the given key from a file containing key-value pairs
