You may or may not look forward to discuss a lot about the job with the interviewer, but as an authoritative person, an interviewer has the right and is bound to ask a lot of questions in order to reach to a conclusion regarding the capability of the candidate and whether s/he is competent enough to be qualified for further rounds or can be selected for the position s/he has applied for. Once an individual applies for the job and gets confirmation regarding the interview, s/he should start preparing for the collections interview questions and learn how s/he has to answer those questions because this process plays a very critical role in selection, as the interviewer gets to know myriad facts about your personality and characteristics as a professional being.
It is one of the most important events in the life of people who have never appeared for an interview before. Hence, it is necessary to treat this event as a remarkable one and make the necessary preparations so that you do not regret later that you missed out somewhere that led to the event being uneventful or say, disappointing, because you could not grab the job you were looking for. Rather than treating it as a mundane task, you can opt to enjoy it by indulging yourself in learning through different methods and interacting with the professionals to enhance your knowledge base.
To help you prepare well, we have collected some common collection interview questions that an employer will ask. These questions will help you to do the necessary homework and push yourself one step closer to getting the job.
Non-technical Questions
Answer: Here, do not give a random description about the skills, knowledge, and experience that you possess. It will just draw an unclear picture and will confuse the reader, thus making him disinterested in knowing further about you. Start with either your professional experience or academic qualifications and gradually move on to other things that you believe the employer should know about you. You can also tell about your hobbies or your participation and activities such as social work or involvement with a nonprofit organization.
Answer: Everybody knows that we work to earn a living. However, your inclination and level of interest decide whether you can just earn a livelihood or achieve excellence and recognition in the industry. Explain to the employer about what made you choose this profession for your career and also what you have been doing in order to keep yourself updated with the knowledge and skills required to excel and out-perform in this field.
Answer: Whatever you feel is your biggest strength and weakness, discuss it with the employer, except for cases when you would not like to disclose it even with the closest of your friends or family members. While what you consider your strength will represent your productive qualities, discussing about your weakness suggests that you are open to accept wrongdoings and willing to change your habits.
Answer: If you do believe that you want to reach a certain position in your life, explain it clearly to the interviewer. On the other hand, if you do not believe in planning and instead focus on living each day as it comes, tell that too. Remember that the interviewer can easily read your facial expressions and will come to know whether you are faking or stating what is real.
Technical Questions
Answer: Collections framework is nothing but an interface that enables a used to sort, manipulate, and process batch data as a single unit. It is time saving for the programmers as they do not have to perform many procedures in the process.
Answer: Iterator is a module that allows the programmer to cycle forward across the collection in order to remove or obtain elements.
Listiterator is an extended form of iterator and the only difference between iterator and listiterator is that the latter allows to cycle forward and reverse through the collection.
Answer: In a set, you can store elements in a random order but without any duplication, whereas in a list, you have the chance to store elements in an order but with duplicate elements.
Answer: Set interface allows the programmers to access the elements of a collection in a finite mathematical pattern.
Answer: LinkedList is used to implement a queue.
Answer: HashMap and TreeMap.
You won't find it difficult to answer the collections interview questions provided you prepare well. We hope that the questions and answers we have provided will definitely help you in the pursuit of winning the employer's confidence. All the best!