What I hate about interviewing in India

Moving back to India, after spending 5 years in the Netherlands one of my major concerns was if I will be able to find a good job in India. The concern was not because there are no good jobs in India, the concern was mainly because of:

• How the candidates get shortlisted in India?
• How the interviews are conducted in India?

I began my job hunt by directly applying at companies carrer portal with no luck. I either got no replies or I got automated replies like we are processing your profile and will get back to you/ or in the mean while look at other opportunities.

Next I started contacting recruiters through LinkedIn few replied and few did not which is fair enough. My luck was better when I did this compared to carrer portal of companies.

Next step and the most successful one was applying through naukri.com. But the downside of naukri is you get a lot of calls from contractor and staffing agencies also people who want to scam you.

The ways interview are conducted here in India:

• First and foremost the way you are treated when you go for interviews at a few comapnies are so bad. They make you wait outside for a long time even though your interviews were scheduled. You won’t be even offered water or won’t have washroom access!
• The pressure recruiters put on you to attend the interview the very next day, without considering that the candidate might want to take a day or two to prepare. Some recruiters even do not inform you what sort of interview you will be attneding. If it is either a technical interview/ managerial interview or just wanting to understand what you have worked on. I’ve driven twice almost 30+km only to find out that my area of work is not what they are looking for. Which they could have asked me over phone!
• The most annoying is few questions they ask based on code snippets. These code snippets are exactly the ones which companies spend millions to make sure such code is not present in production code. So basically you hire people who can solve these highly ambiguos code and then spend money to make sure that such codes are not present in your production code. A bit counter intutive isn’t it! Below is one such example

What will be the value assigned to i? 
int main() 
{ 
    int a=1, b=2, c=3, i;   
    i = a, b, c;   // stores a into i                                
    i = (a, b, c); //stores c into i
    return 0;
}
This question checks if you know about the comma operator in C.
Companies want to avoid this type of code in production!