How to get an internship at Ola
Ola Cabs or ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd. emerged as a solution to all our daily transportation problems, and never did we have to worry about cabs not showing up at our door again. Freeing us from the daily haggling with Auto drivers, Ola is leveraging technology and building innovative solutions to redefine mobility for billions. With its services in over 100 cities, Ola employs two-wheelers to six-wheelers to provide Indians with a convenient travel experience.
What are the different types of internships at Ola and who all are eligible to apply?
Ola provides internships to engineering, MBA, and finance students for a duration of 2-6 months across their offices in Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi NCR. Ola internships come in a variety of profiles. Engineering graduates can work in software development, machine learning, or data analytics while the MBA students have an option of interning in profiles such as operations, marketing, and finance. Apart from this, students can also go for customer support domain. Ola provides a stipend of 5-15K per month depending on the profile that you’re hired for.
How to apply for internships in Ola?
1. Apply online – Ola Careers
Apply to Ola Cabs internships through their official careers portal. Register on it and attach your resume/cover letter in a PDF format.
2. Referral – Connect with employees at Ola cabs via LinkedIn or Facebook, and request them to refer you for an internship at Ola.
3. Email the HR – You can get in touch with the HR over email at careers@olacabs.com and explore internship opportunities.
4. Campus recruitment – Ola hires interns from select few colleges such as IITs, NITs, and IIMs.
What after applying to internships in Ola Cabs?
Ola Cabs’ recruitment process involves an initial screening done on the basis of an aptitude test which contains questions based on English, logical reasoning, basic mathematical aptitude, and computer fundamentals. The students who clear the test progress to a field-specific interview followed by an HR interview. However, if you have applied to a software development/data science profile, you’ll have to take a programming test followed by two technical interviews and an HR interview. The programming test contains questions such as –
1. Given a string, find the number of substrings that are a palindrome.
2. Sort an array in an increasing order such that the value of V is minimum, where V = sum(position of an element in given array * position of element sorted array) and position of the element is 1 based.
3. Destruct a matrix completely such that the sum of elements destructed by you is minimum.
Ola interview questions for management profiles:
1. What marketing strategies would you employ to bring more first-time customers and improve repeated customer use?
2. Let’s say Uber expands its business in a particular city with 30% lower ride fares, what do you suggest we do?
3. Given a marketing budget of INR 1 Crore, how would you allocate the money to your marketing strategies?
The first technical interview is quite simple. They mostly ask you about the projects you undertook during your college and/or previous internships and a few questions about the basics of programming languages and database. For instance,
1. Explain the concepts of OOPs.
2. What is left inner join?
3. What is job scheduling?
In the second technical interview, you are asked to write codes for different problem statements. Some sample problems are –
1. Write a pseudocode to show that two strings are anagrams of each other.
2. Print the left view of a binary search tree.
3. Given two sorted arrays, find the median of the two.
4. Explain the difference between static and dynamic programming languages.
For more interview questions asked during an Ola interview, you may visit here.
The HR interview questions are pretty similar for all the profiles. Apart from the general questions asked in most HR interviews, you might also be given some puzzles and guesstimates. Some sample questions are –
1. Why do you want to work with Ola?
2. What are your expectations from Ola?
3. What all were your responsibilities during your last internship?
4. If we ask you to take a transfer to another Ola office at the earliest but you haven’t completed your ongoing assignment, what will you do?
What to expect when your Ola internship starts?
Ola provides a week’s accommodation to all its interns. It has a 2-day induction program. On the first day, higher authorities introduce their teams and their respective responsibilities followed by a visit to the attachment centre on the second day where partners (drivers) attach their cars with Ola. On the third day, you are allotted projects and a mentor. If you’re hired for a technical profile, you’ll be credited with Ola money to explore Ola cabs and identify any technical glitches.
You can also work on multiple projects as per your preferences and capabilities. The work culture is pretty chill, and they provide flexible work timings. If your manager is impressed with your work, you may also be given a pre-placement offer. And did I mention Ola’s Mumbai office has a recreational area equipped with Foosball and Table Tennis and an on-site gym facility!
Words of advice from ex-interns:
1. Read about the business models of Ola in and out, and have a clear understanding of their target customers.
2. Practice guesstimates and analyse some business problems that you could be asked in the interview.
3. The aptitude test has a CAT-like format and difficulty level, so practice accordingly.
4. Ola gives freedom and flexibility to all its interns to select their projects and switch them as per their interests.
You can go through Harsh’s enriching internship journey at Ola for a further peek into Ola internships.
Want to explore your career paths? Well, apply to Ola summer internships and drive into the realm of opportunities. You can also apply to similar meaningful internships on Internshala; just register here!
