As any other IT company in India, HCL conducts placement tests as part of its recruitment process. The pattern is quite simple and straightforward with standard sections. This makes preparing for HCL placement papers really an easy task.Sections one could expect in HCL papers are quantitative aptitude, programming fundamentals and basic computer science concepts. There will be a paper on English grammar and usage as well. Below are few tips to prepare effectively for HCL placement papers:
Referring previous HCL placement papers with solutions will do lot of good. These can be collected from seniors, staff as well as friends who would had attended HCL placement tests. A collection is necessary rather than sticking to few papers because of the differences in the pattern followed across colleges. HCL papers closely resemble those of Wipro, Accenture and HP. Hence previous questions of these companies can be referred as well.
Trying online papers on major websites, practicing with books for quantitative aptitude, C, computer science concepts etc can help a lot.
Questions from programming concepts require a good understanding of structured programming concepts in C. Especially questions from arrays,pointers, functions and macros can be difficult to deal with. In addition, one has to practice sorting algorithms like bubble and insertion sort. There are several good books that can help one to get equipped to answer questions from C.
To prepare for questions from computer science concepts one has to read several books spanning areas like operating systems, processors, system software etc.Computer Networks is one area where questions are quite common. For example, there can be questions asking to name OSI (Open Systems Interconnect) layers and their associated functions.
As discussed in the above paragraphs, preparing for HCL paper is easy and not time consuming due to its close similarity with other papers. However, a good practice of previous papers is necessary to get through these papers.