Campus drives, career fairs and off-campus routes, new-grad coding rounds, and comparing first offers.
5 questions in Early Careers, Internships & Graduate Hiring.
Expect easy-to-medium problems on arrays, strings, hashing, sorting, recursion and basic trees or graphs, graded as much on clean code and clear reasoning as on the algorithm. Calibrate by timing yourself on unseen mediums, out loud, rather than by counting solved problems.
Read the bond first and turn it into a number: what you would repay, over what period, if you left early. Then compare fixed first-year pay rather than headline salary, what the training and the startup's senior engineers would each teach you, and how stable each job is. Neither offer wins by default.
Through off-campus hiring routes: career fairs, graduate job boards and employers' early-careers pages, direct applications to smaller companies, and referrals from alumni and people you meet. Apply early in the hiring cycle, target roles properly, and give every application a project worth asking about.
Treat a campus placement drive as a series of separate elimination gates. The aptitude test checks speed and accuracy, the technical round checks fundamentals and your own resume, and HR checks communication and flexibility. Patterns and cut-offs vary, so take the official details from your placement cell, not forums.
Sort the five rejections by the stage where each one ended, because a pattern by stage tells you more than any single rejection. Then fix that stage only: ask for feedback where you can, run mock interviews that recreate it, and practise against it before the next process.