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Web: www.cerner.com | HQ: Kansas City, MO

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Updated May 24, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 38 ratings

2.6

“Easy” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 38 ratings

Positive	61%
Neutral	26%
Negative	13%

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3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed May 2011 (took a day)

A phone interview, a personality test consisting of meeting with 3 hiring managers and a skills test of how to use OOP concepts to build a chess program.

Interview Questions

Tell me about how you dealt with a difficult team member?

Answer Question

Other Details

I applied In-Person and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Skills Test and a Personality Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed May 2012 (took 2 weeks)

First I was contacted by a recruiter. She immediately replied when I replied to her, and we set up a phone interview. Then I had a technical interview and then i was invited onsite. The questions were very easy. There was two types of interviews. One technical and one behavioral. The technical was very easy. The behavioral was kinda hard in the sense they were digging deep into specific examples. In my opinion, it was more technical than the actual technical interview.
Questions were revolving around basic Database concepts, Strings and their manipulations, recursion, searching and sorting, trees, memory management, testing, and OOPS. If you review these, you should be fine.
I knew I cleared the interview, but got no offer. Didnt specify a reason. But the experience was very pleasant nontheless. Would definitely recomment working for this company.

Interview Questions

Describe a situation where you failed in your project, and what steps did you take to rectify it

View Answers (1)

Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Feb 2012 in Kansas City, MO (took 2 weeks)

Had two phone interviews, one was HR with behavioral questions. The technical rounds were easy including data structure questions like recursion, binary search etc . To debug a possible exception in a small database statement. They asked me about my previous work experience and the projects that I worked on. The interviews were handled in a professional manner, they flowed us to kansas city, had a tour of kansas city.

Interview Questions

Different types of database joins?

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Declined Offer

Interviewed Mar 2012 in Kansas City, MO (took 3 weeks)

My first interview with Cerner was an on campus interview at my school, and that was a one on one interview that was entirely technical and the interviewer just read me questions from a packet. I felt like I didn't do a great job, since there were several object oriented questions that I blanked on, and I was pretty nervous since it was one of the first full time job interviews I did. Regardless, I received an email exactly 1 week later saying they wanted me to come to Experience Cerner day for more interviews and to see the Cerner campus.
They gave me several dates to pick from, and I set mine up for about 2 weeks later. They provided a hotel room for me and gave me a $75 visa prepaid credit card afterwards. I was told to arrive before 4pm the day before the interview to have time to check in and get ready for dinner. They took me and a group of about 20 other candidates by bus to a nice restaurant where we sat with several other candidates per table and also a Cerner employee to talk to. I really enjoyed dinner, and had a good time talking to the Cerner employee.
The next day we were all taken to the Cerner campus for interviews. I was interviewed by two different people, the first one asked only technical questions, and the second only behavioral. They were both really nice, and easy to talk to. Both of these interviews seemed to go extremely well, and weren't very difficult at all. After we ate lunch in the cafeteria and had a short tour of the campus we were all taken back to the hotel and it was all over. I was told that I would hear back within two weeks, and I received a phone call with an offer only a week later.

Interview Questions

Using an object oriented approach, if you have a class "Car", how would "Paint" relate to "Car"?

Answer Question

Use a binary search to find the number 9 in a list of 20 numbers

Answer Question

Reason for Declining

The only reason I declined this offer was because I received an other offer from a company that will look awesome on my resume that I've always wanted to work for. I was really excited about the Cerner offer and I would have taken it if I hadn't gotten the other offer. The Cerner offer was a significantly lower salary, but the cost of living in Kansas City is very low. I tried to negotiate for a higher offer and they refused.

Other Details

The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

View Comments (1)

Inappropriate?

1.0

Very Easy Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Apr 2012 in Kansas City, MO (took a day)

Things to prepare.

OOPS basic [inheritance , encapsulation]
What is relative database.
class diagram -- chess game
Using switch case if more if statement has to be used -- I made mistake in this
memory management how done in java - talk abt garbage collection

Interview Questions

Relative database

View Answers (1)

chess game

View Answers (1)

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a Group/Panel Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Mar 2012 in Kansas City, MO (took 1+ week)

Following were the Interview Qs:

Intro:
• Tell me about yourself
• Why do u want to work at Cerner
> Why you want to leave you current job
> Best thing about your job
> Least thing you liked abt your job

HR:
• Describe a situation where you have difficulties with your team members
• Describe a scenario where you tried to troubleshoot and you succeeded
• Describe a scenario where you tried to troubleshoot and you failed
• What are your 3 biggest achievements so far
• were the Managers unhappy about your work anytime?
• What is the biggest mistake you made in a past job.
• What was the challenging work in your career

Techie:
• If a user reports that an application is slow, what steps would you take?
• What are scopes in programming languages and their uses?
• Explain a chess board in term of OOPS. What methods, functions, etc
• How would you go about designing a program that determines whether or not a number is prime?
• How would you go about coding a game of checkers?
• What's the difference in encapsulation and inheritance?
• What is database normalization?
• Make a binary tree where the nodes are the letters in "Cerner".
• String reversal program was given and I was told to explain the output.
• Question about unit testing. How to create unit test cases.
• What is a deadlock?
• If there was anything you wanted to change about a programming language, what would it be?
• How will you manage the memory while programming.
• Complexity of linked list and tree insertion
• Explain the differences between searching through a linked list vs. a binary tree
• explain a time when you used polymorphism
• DBMS vs RDBMS
• Linked List implementation

Interview Questions

• Tell me about yourself
• Why do u want to work at Cerner

Answer Question

• Describe a situation where you have difficulties with your team members

• Describe a scenario where you tried to troubleshoot and you succeeded
• Describe a scenario where you tried to troubleshoot and you failed
• What are your 3 biggest achievements so far
• were the Managers unhappy about your work anytime?

• What is the biggest mistake you made in a past job.
• What was the challenging work in your career

Answer Question

Negotiation Details

I dint try but u can if hv experience of atleast 6 months

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Group/Panel Interview, a Drug Test and a Background Check.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2012 (took 1+ week)

The intial round was a basic HR round where they asked me about my project experiences , favourite languages, the toughest problem I faced in a project and how I overcame it etc.. it was a breeze basically.
They scheduled a technical interview a week later. the interviewer was a bit mechanical in the sense, he was very quiet and went about his business.. no pleasantaries!

Interview Questions

Anyway he quizzed me about my project work( in Java and PHP), then threw the oft. repeated - design class structure to implement a chess board question, difference between public,private and protected fields etc.. and some program implementation questions

Answer Question

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2012 in Kansas City, MO (took 3 weeks)

Got a email from their recruiter as there was a demand to fulfill position in the velocity programs.

First Step : A Telephonic interview from the recruiter asking behavioral questions and then later said me that one the technical recruiter will give me a call for an technical.

Second Step : A Technical recruiter gave me a call asking me questions based on OOPs general concepts.
memory related questions, Database normalization, A parking lot questions, desing a game of CHESS with oops concept.

Third Step : Got a call email from the Cerner Recruiter saying that i have been shortlisted for the final round and a cerner day experience which will be having two interviews back to back 30mins each...
Will post my experience once i am back with it.,,,

Interview Questions

Design a Game of CHESS using OOPs concept.

Design a Car Parking Lot.

OOPs basic questions.

Answer Question

Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2012 (took 3+ weeks)

I had 2 interviews in cerner. One was behavioral and another was technical. For the preparation of behavioral questions, prepare it from various websites, this was a sort of easy one. After that the technical was scheduled which was roaming around general OOP concepts. They called me to Kansas for the final round. Will go on 4th April. Will post u soon about my experience.

Interview Questions

Implement OOP concept in chess.

Answer Question

How will you manage the memory while programming.

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Declined Offer

Interviewed Feb 2012 in Kansas City, MO (took 2 weeks)

Interview process consisted of Initial phone screening (nothing technical here, just about my experience and interest level). Then they fly me to Kansas where the actual interviews took place. It consisted of 3 rounds of 1:1 where they ask you behavioral questions(50%) , asks about your previous experience and few technical questions( how would you design a chess program using OOP concepts, gave a pseudo code for string reversal using recursion and asked what is the output, and other similar questions).