Google techie who conducts job interviews reveals topics asked in screening round

Software engineer Anu Sharma said she has interviewed more than 15 candidates in two months as part of her extra community contribution. (Image credit: Anu Sharma/X)

A software engineer with Google in Hyderabad, who conducts job interviews as part of her extra community contribution, has recently shared a few tips and tricks that candidates can possibly use while prepping for their interview with the tech giant.

Anu Sharma, 22, had earlier told Moneycontrol that in the last couple of months, she has interviewed more than 15 candidates with each interview ranging from about 45 minutes to one hour.

Taking to X, she wrote, "These topics are asked in Google screening round! I got rejected here twice because most eliminations happen at this stage, so clearing it should be your priority."

Sharma recommended candidates focus on the following pointers:
Arrays: Sliding window, two pointers, binary search, sorting, greedy algorithms
Strings: Palindromes, pattern matching
Stacks and queues: Next greater/smaller element, BFS, flood fill
Trees: Binary trees, BSTs, traversals
Graphs: DFS, BFS, Dijkstra’s, MST (Prim’s/Kruskal’s), DSU
Heaps: Min/max heap, Kth smallest/largest element
Recursion and backtracking (very very important): Permutations and combinations

These topics are asked in Google screening round!I got rejected here twice because most eliminations happen at this stage, so clearing it should be your priority. Focus on:Arrays: Sliding window, two pointers, binary search, sorting, greedy algorithmsStrings:
Anu Sharma (@O_Anu_O) March 11, 2025

"Don’t waste time on topics like segment trees and tries, as they are rarely asked in this round. Instead, practice time and space complexities for the data structures and algorithms you use," Sharma added.

Earlier this month, Sharma had also shared how she felt that conducting interviews was more tiring than taking them.

"After taking more than 15 job interviews at Google, I've learned taking interviews is more exhausting than giving interviews," Sharma said. She added that she has been conducting two to three interviews every week and has conducted around 20 of them during her tenure at the tech giant. "While interviewing at least you're coding and solving something. While taking an interview, you need to sit and listen intensively.... I'd rather code."

Answering a question about the average duration of each interview, she said it takes "45 minutes, but it extends like 5-10 minutes". Sharma added that another challenge of conducting interviews is "actively solving the problem along with the interviewee".