DEV Community: Team Astra

Mass Recruiter or Product Company? How 28 Hiring Processes Differ

Team Astra — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 04:00:34 +0000

Of the 28 companies in Astra's campus database, 13 hire at mass or volume scale, 5 run smaller volume programmes, 6 hire as product or selective employers, 2 are consulting firms and 2 are PSUs. Only 6 of the 28 are rated high difficulty, and two of those are ISRO and Zoho.

Service company or product company is the usual way students frame placement choices. The data supports the distinction, though not always in the expected direction.

The five hiring models

Model	Companies
Mass or volume (13)	TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, Accenture, Capgemini, HCLTech, Tech Mahindra, LTIMindtree, IBM, Mphasis, Hexaware, Coforge
Volume, smaller programmes (5)	Cyient, Deloitte USI (Analyst), L&T Technology Services, Persistent Systems (Martian), S&P Global (Apprentice and Operations)
Product and SDE (4)	Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle
Selective (2)	Intuit, Zoho
Consulting and advisory (2)	EY, PwC
PSU and government (2)	ISRO, Bharat Electronics (BEL)

Difficulty and prestige are different things

Six companies are rated high difficulty: Adobe, Amazon, Intuit, Microsoft, ISRO and Zoho. The other 22 are moderate.

Two of those six are not product multinationals. The ISRO written exam is 80 branch technical questions in 120 minutes and tests core engineering depth rather than software skill. Zoho runs an offline written test and then interviews you on code you wrote yourself. Both are hard in different ways from an Amazon interview.

Every mass recruiter in the dataset is rated moderate, including TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant and Accenture. Their filtering power comes from volume and eligibility criteria rather than difficulty in any single round.

The round that usually does not change

Most processes here end the same way, with a technical interview followed by an HR interview focused on fit. 24 of the 28 companies run one. It is not a formality, but it is the most predictable part of campus hiring.

The four companies with no standalone HR round are Amazon, Microsoft, Intuit and ISRO. All four are rated high difficulty. Each closes with something harder instead: the Amazon Bar Raiser, the Microsoft As Appropriate round, the Intuit values interview, and for ISRO no behavioural round at all, only technical depth.

The rounds that differentiate

Company	Distinctive round	Stated focus
Amazon	Bar Raiser	Leadership Principles
Microsoft	As Appropriate Round	Depth and culture
TCS	Managerial Round	Situational
Cyient	L2 Client Round	Project fit
Intuit	Behavioural and fit	Values
Zoho	Technical Interview	Your own code
ISRO and BEL	Technical Interview	Core branch depth

Each of these rewards something specific.

The Amazon Bar Raiser is run by someone outside the hiring team who holds a veto, and it is explicitly about the Leadership Principles. Preparing STAR format stories mapped to those principles is the round, not extra advice around it.

The Microsoft As Appropriate round is a final discretionary interview, usually with a senior leader, covering both technical depth and culture.

The TCS Managerial Round is situational. It is the reason TCS runs three interview rounds rather than two, and it is the one candidates most often enter unprepared.

The Cyient L2 Client Round is unusual in campus hiring, since it assesses fit against a specific client project rather than the company in general.

Zoho interviews you on code you wrote. Not a whiteboard problem, but your own work. This is the strongest argument in the dataset for having real projects rather than tutorial clones.

Rounds per company

The number of stages runs from 2 at ISRO to 5 at Hexaware and Zoho, with most companies at 3 or 4. More rounds does not mean harder. Hexaware runs five moderate difficulty rounds, while the two ISRO rounds are rated high.

For mass recruiters the usual shape is an online assessment, then a technical interview, then HR. For product companies it is an online assessment, then two or more technical interviews, then a values or bar raising round. Consulting firms sit between the two. EY and PwC lean on situational judgement and game based testing rather than coding, and the PwC assessment has no coding section at all.

Where to spend your preparation

There is a real trade off here.

Preparing for mass recruiters means aptitude drilling, speed, pseudocode and CS fundamentals at breadth. The return is a high chance of clearing 13 companies with near identical filters, since clearing the pattern once makes you eligible for most of them. The ceiling is lower.

Preparing for product and selective companies means depth in data structures, algorithms and system design, plus real projects. The return is concentrated in 6 companies with high difficulty ratings and much smaller intakes. The ceiling is higher and the hit rate is lower.

Preparing for PSUs is a separate track built on core branch engineering rather than software, with age limits instead of gap year limits and eligibility set per notification.

Most students do not have to choose. The mass recruiter track is cheap insurance, since the aptitude preparation is finite and it makes you eligible for the largest block of hiring in the dataset. Build that floor first, then spend the remaining time on the depth that product companies reward.

Zoho is the exception, since it rewards neither pattern. It has no CGPA cutoff, accepts active backlogs, and interviews you on your own code. See the Zoho recruitment process.

One caveat

Hiring models shift year to year. Companies that ran mass drives in one cycle sometimes run selective ones the next, and the difficulty ratings here reflect the process as documented in August 2026.

Source: Astra campus recruitment database, covering 28 companies hiring in India. Process data verified August 2026. Full per company guides at useastra.in/campus.

I tracked 3,529 job posts in India for 30 days. Here's what "fresher" actually means.

Team Astra — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 05:12:19 +0000

Every fresher I talk to says the same thing: "Every job wants experience." So I checked.

I'm building Astra, a job platform for Indian freshers. It collects openings every day from company career pages and applicant tracking systems such as Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby. In the 30 days to 30 October 2026, 3,529 new roles opened in India.

Only 1,079 of them (31%) were entry-level. 1,563 (44%) were senior roles, and 879 (25%) were mid-level.

So yes, most jobs do want experience. But about 36 entry-level roles still open every day, and most freshers miss them, because those posts don't look the way freshers expect. Here's what an entry-level job in India actually looks like right now.

1. Fresher jobs almost never say "fresher"

If you search job sites for "fresher", "trainee" or "graduate", you're searching for the rarest words in entry-level titles. Here's how often each word appeared in the 1,079 entry-level job titles:

Word in the title	Entry-level roles
Associate	277
Engineer	167
Analyst	140
Executive	119
Specialist	84
Junior	29
Trainee	14
Graduate	6

"Associate" alone appears in 26% of entry-level titles. "Trainee" and "Graduate" together cover 2%. Another 47 titles marked the level with a number, such as "Software Engineer I" or "Analyst 1".

What to search for instead: Associate, Analyst, Engineer I, Associate Software Engineer, and the word "Executive" for business roles. Then filter by experience, not by title.

2. Excel is asked for more than Python and SQL combined

811 of the entry-level posts listed the skills they wanted. The most common ones:

Skill	Entry-level posts asking for it	Share of the 811
Microsoft Excel	287	35%
Microsoft Office	135	17%
Microsoft Word	131	16%
Microsoft PowerPoint	118	15%
Python	110	14%
SQL	103	13%
CRM software	57	7%
Power BI	41	5%
Git	37	5%
AWS	36	4%
Java	34	4%
Tableau	33	4%

Excel shows up in 287 posts. Python and SQL together show up in 213.

That's because most entry-level jobs in India aren't software jobs. Analyst, operations, finance and customer roles all run on spreadsheets. Among the technical skills, Python and SQL are far ahead of everything else. Java, which most Indian CS curriculums lead with, shows up in only 34 posts.

If you're a CS student: Python plus SQL is the safest pair to show on a resume right now. If you're open to analyst roles, put Excel on your resume as a real skill (pivot tables, lookups, charts), not as a filler line.

3. Pay is rarely listed, and when it is, it's modest

Only 89 of the 1,079 entry-level posts (8%) stated a salary. Among those 89:

The median was ₹4 LPA.
Half paid between ₹3 and ₹7 LPA.
The highest was ₹17 LPA.

The ₹20+ LPA fresher packages you see on LinkedIn are real, but they usually come through campus placements at a small number of companies, not through open job posts.

4. Where the jobs are, and who's hiring

Bangalore had 306 of the 1,079 entry-level roles (28%). Hyderabad (103), Gurugram (94), Mumbai (91), Pune (75) and Chennai (71) followed. Only 68 (6%) were remote.

The roles came from 575 different companies. That's the other surprise: no single employer dominates. The ones that posted the most were Marriott International (23), EY (14), Swiggy (12), Tata Capital (12), Moody's (11), Kotak Mahindra Bank (11), DHL (10) and Amazon (10).

Most of these are not "dream companies" in college WhatsApp groups. That's worth using: a role that fewer of your classmates are watching is a role with less competition.

What I'd do differently as a fresher

Search by level, not by the word "fresher". Use Associate, Analyst, Engineer I and Executive, then filter by experience.
Lead with Python and SQL, and list Excel properly if you'd take an analyst role.
Look beyond the 20 famous names. 575 companies hired entry-level people this month. Banks, consultancies, logistics and hospitality groups all run tech and analyst teams in India.
Apply early. About 36 entry-level roles open every day, and many close within a few weeks.
Expect ₹3 to 7 LPA from open postings, and treat higher offers as the exception, not the plan.

How I collected this

Astra pulls openings daily from company career pages and applicant tracking systems (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and others). This post covers every role in India first seen in the 30 days to 30 October 2026, excluding international roles. "Entry-level" is Astra's classification from each role's title and description. Skills come from the skills each post listed, and salaries only from posts that stated one; estimates are excluded.

I'm building Astra to make this easier: every entry-level role in one place, with direct apply links. New roles also go out daily on Telegram. If you want a cut of this data I didn't cover, ask in the comments and I'll run it.