Target Corp. Interview Experience For Internship (On-Campus) 2023
Interview Experience
Target came to our campus in Dec 2023, and only CS, IS, AIML and EC branches were allowed to participate. It was a pool drive and all rounds were virtual.
Round 1 Online ...
Full Details
Target came to our campus in Dec 2023, and only CS, IS, AIML and EC branches were allowed to participate. It was a pool drive and all rounds were virtual.
Round 1
Online Assessment This round had MCQs covering reasoning, logical, Quantitative(Numerical) and technical questions. Alongside there were 2 coding questions (Try solving them yourself first) In a school, there are activity groups. Each group has been identified by a digit from 0 to 9. The school principal wants to find out how many students are in a particular activity group so that the school management can provide a classroom for the activity according to the number of students. Write an algorithm for the school management to get the number of students who belong to a particular activity group.
Input: The first line of the input consists of an integer-particularGroup, representing the activity group whose total students the principal wants to know. The second line of input consists of an integer - studentGroup, representing the groups that are selected by the students.
Output: Print an integer representing the number of students who belong to a particular activity group.
Constraints: 0≤ particular group $9 0≤ student group ≤99999999 Note : Each digit of the student group represents the activity of a particular student.
Example input : 2 123228 Output : 3 Explanation : Activity 2 is selected by 3 students. Therefore, the final output is 3. It was a graph-based question, Refer to the reference link. (I hardcoded two outputs to cover all test cases). A lot of students had written the test, and 29 students got shortlisted.
Round 2 Technical &
HR (75 min) The HR called and interviews were scheduled at the convenience of the student. The interview happened over a Zoom call. The panel had two interviewers (one of them was a data engineer and was well-versed in Python). The interview began with an introduction, which also included a brief about my past intern experience and projects I had on my CV. The interviewer asked me my preferred programming language(Ans - python), and I was asked to rate my Python skills out of 10. Right off the bat, we dived into coding and technical things What are tuples in Python? How is it different from the list? I was asked to code alongside his instructions. Given a tuple ( 1, 2, [1,2,3], "ABC" ), I had to print any element in it which was a List or String. Upon giving a solution, I was asked to not use if statements in my code and also to print each element of List in a new line but the string to be printed in a single line.
Note: this checks your in-depth understanding of the language. Look up where the branchless programming paradigm for this. Next given a list of integers, write a code to print the maximum valued integer and most repeated integer.
Note: I was asked to give concise code so I used the understanding Counter from the the Collections module. The interviewer moved ahead by testing the understanding of DS, OOPs, DBMS and Python. What are queues and stacks? Give practical applications? How to check if the stack or queue is empty? Overloading and overriding in OOPs. Elaborate on the Diamond problem (multiple inheritance) in Java. DML commands in SQL, transactions in SQL, and little on MySQL and PostgreSQL because I had used them in my projects. I was asked if Python supports multi-threading, which led to a brief discussion on python-GIL (global interpreter lock) and mutex-lock and semaphores. HR questions: There were mostly scenario-based questions, Imagine you worked on a solution for 1 week and your team members
rejected your solution, how do you handle it? mostly teamwork-based scenarios. Little talk about family, and my hometown and I was asked if I had any questions. I asked about the department the interviewers worked in, the work culture and feedback on my interview. (Because of network issues I couldn't communicate here) The results were very late, about 12 days later after the New Year's party I woke up in the afternoon and checked my phone I had been selected (along with 3 more people). 5-6 people had to go through one more round.
Note: Don't take any questions lightly, take a while to think and answer, and keep the answers very articulate. All the best!!
About This Question
This is a candidate experience report from a target corporation interview for a data science role (intern level) during the oa round reported in 2024.
It covers the following topics: Strings, Sql, Graph, Stack Queue, Os, Graphs, Queue, Stack .
More Target Corporation Interview Questions
About Target Corporation Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Target Corporation. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Target Corporation are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Target Corporation interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Target Corporation reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Target Corporation Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Target Corporation reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.