For many aspiring tech professionals, landing a job at Google is a dream. But clearing the screening round—where most candidates are eliminated—is the real challenge. Anu Sharma, a Hyderabad-based software engineer at Google, has now shared seven key topics to focus on during this crucial stage.
In a viral post on X, Sharma revealed how she got rejected twice before finally making it. "Most eliminations happen at this stage, so clearing it should be your priority," she wrote.
The 7 Key Topics to Focus On
Sharma listed the core areas that candidates should master:
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" for permutations and combinations
She also warned candidates not to waste time on segment trees and tries, as they are rarely tested in screening rounds. Instead, she advised focusing on understanding the time and space complexities of commonly used algorithms.
"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," she said.
How Tech Aspirants Reacted
Sharma’s post resonated with many. One user emphasized the need to go beyond coding platforms like LeetCode, writing, "Google screening might be just a small hurdle… Now Leetcoding is not the only option. Google and big tech ask practical-based questions now."
Others thanked her for her insights, "I appreciate you sharing this; your experience says it all! Learning from someone with such insights is truly valuable."
Adding to her inputs, another user commented, "i think the most important thing is time management in an google interview, because u have limited time and u have to explain the approach and write the code in fixed time constraints."