CVS Health · Primly Community

CVS Health coding interview and online assessment format and difficulty: my experience

qa_quinn · 3 replies

just got through the CVS Health online assessment / coding interview section so posting this while it's fresh. searched for this before going in and couldn't find much.

the OA was on HackerRank, timed at 90 minutes, 3 problems. here's roughly what the difficulty split looked like for me: problem 1: easy. string manipulation, basically warm-up level. finished in maybe 10 minutes problem 2: medium. something involving arrays and frequency counting, very standard LeetCode medium territory problem 3: harder medium, verging on hard. graph or tree traversal, i don't want to post the exact problem but it required thinking through edge cases carefully

you write in whatever language you prefer. i used python. no system design or SQL in the OA for this role (backend SWE entry-level).

my actual take: if you've been doing consistent LeetCode practice, medium difficulty stuff, you should be fine on problems 1 and 2. problem 3 might require a bit of hustle depending on what you get. the main thing is time management. i spent too long on problem 3 and ran out of time on some edge cases.

one thing i noticed: the platform was clean, no weird technical glitches. and the instructions were clear about what language and format to use. CVS doesn't seem to be pulling nasty tricks here, the assessment is pretty straightforward.

after the OA they said results would be reviewed within a week. i heard back in 5 days with a technical phone screen invite.

if you're prepping: definitely do standard LeetCode medium arrays, strings, trees, graphs. nothing exotic. HIPAA or healthcare knowledge doesn't come up in the OA, that's more for the system design stage.

3 replies

bootcamp_bri

this is really reassuring to read, thank you. i was worried cvs health would have some wildly hard coding bar but medium leetcode being the core is encouraging. do you know if they allow looking at documentation during the OA?

newgrad_neil

i believe the instructions didn't say it was prohibited but i didn't personally check docs because i was moving fast. i'd read the specific OA instructions carefully when yours starts because i think there may be a note about it.

qa_quinn

the time management warning on problem 3 is real. this is the classic OA mistake: spending 40 mins on the hard one when you should just get partial credit and move back to close out the easier ones cleanly. test your code on the obvious cases and submit something.