Publicis Sapient has a unique interview progress where they try to access the candidate's eligibility for the job role by conducting various rounds on interview. Now it might look like any other company's interview but its not as they are looking for UNICORNS to join them, which obviously doesn't exists. So you can fake to show that you are one if you want to get in there.
I have given 3 attempts in 3 months time period through their in-house recruiters. All of them knew that I have attempted multiple times. Only recruiters are the best part, 2 out of 3 were professional enough. 1 was not.
1st Experience(Bangalore):
1. Code a given problem inside AWS VDI machine. You will get IDEs in there and round is friendly. It is not proctored and can attempt anytime but with Recruiter's coordination on a chosen time. I was able to solve it within time and it was working well as per the problem statement and test cases listed in pdf in same environment. Though, to my surprise I was rejected as the unicorn in Sapient's technical panel said the output was not matching as per the test case.
2nd Experience(Bangalore):
1. Contacted by a new recruiter, I told him about my last experience. He asked me to reattempt it. I agreed and I was contacted by first attempt's recruiter to re-attempt again. I asked for the exact feedback for first time and then only go ahead with this. The feedback was shared and I learned that they were sloppy in cross checking the test case as the pdf itself had a typo for expected output. I claimed my previous attempt asking recruiter to get it rechecked and directly move me for second round. But they went AWOL on me, never came back. Looks the calling out them for their mistake didn't worked well for me.
2. By the way, next step in this process was to check is a developer can do devops' work too. One should be able to demonstrate programming skills in first round and devops skills(deployment, pipelines, jenkins, docker, etc.) in second round. Further on 2 rounds of interviews followed by managerial and hr rounds were supposed to be conducted.
That's pretty much rounds up the Bangalore's experience.
3rd Experience(Gurgaon):
This time recruiter was professional. I gave the MCQs round, Programming Round, followed by a 2 hour long double interview with a panel of two unicorns (remember they are looking for unicorns and have only unicorns in their company). So interview went pretty well, topics ranging from Core Java, Multithreading, Microservices, Kubernetes, Docker, etc. But the interview panel was not not at all professional. They were not happy to listen to the answers given, but were interested more in speaking themselves. English speaking skills were at 3 out of 10 and they were looking for someone perfect from end to end, a person good at front end, back end, QA and devops stuff. A lone wolf capable of handling technicalities on their own. Recruiters response for feedback was quick, so I really appreciate that. But company's expectations are way beyond normal.
So what I learned was that to crack Sapient's interview is way difficult than cracking Google's interview(I have attempted that so I know) and that's not only because they are looking for person in good in everything also because the recruiter and interviewers can be difficult to deal with.