by Thomas Kinsinger
Director of Technology, E-N Computers
20+ years experience in enterprise IT and managed services.
Do you need to hire a new IT person for your small business but aren’t sure what questions to ask during the interview process to make sure you are hiring someone with the right skills?
Building an IT team can be challenging, but especially in the current economy with a shortage of IT workers. At E-N Computers, I have personally been interviewing and hiring IT professionals for the past 10 years, which has helped me to develop several interview questions that have brought the best results to our team when we hire IT staff.
QUICK ANSWER:
What questions should you ask job candidates in an IT hiring interview?
We use a list of 29 questions that reveal both the people skills and the technical skills of an IT tech candidate. The questions range from “What is Active Directory?” and “What does DHCP stand for and what is its purpose?” to “Give an example of when you had to work with a difficult person. How did you deal with it?” See our complete list.
How important are tech skills for hiring an IT employee?
Now, you might be looking for a generic list of technical interview questions. There are many such lists out there. And many of those lists of “tech interview questions” are aimed at software developers, not IT support technicians and system administrators. But there’s another problem with relying on a long list of technical questions.
Instead of worrying primarily about technical skills, I’m usually looking for people with great people skills and great technical skills. These two strengths are often hard to find together.
In my experience, technical skills can be taught much more easily than people skills. So, I always start with the people skills.
We are a managed IT service provider, so technical skill is a necessity. But it must come with a willingness to work as part of a team. It takes many technicians working cooperatively to care for our clients. An IT genius working alone in a basement, rolling his eyes at the clients is not acceptable.
IT Interview Questions Checklist
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How to find IT technicians with good people skills
How to find IT technicians with good people skillsThe most important character traits that I want to see in people on our team are for them to be humble, hungry and smart. These ideas come from Patrick Lencioni’s book Hiring the Ideal Team Player. This book has had a tremendous impact on our hiring strategy.
Generally, I start the interview with introductions and asking the candidate to provide some background and work history.
From there, we work to see how the candidate aligns with the three traits.
Questions for identifying a humble person
- Tell me about the teams you’ve worked with. What are the things you liked or disliked about those teams?
- Give me an example of a mistake that you made. What did you learn from your mistake?
- Tell me about a team project that you are proud of.
- Was there a time when your integrity was challenged? How did you handle it?
Questions for identifying a hungry or motivated person
- What is the most difficult project or task you have worked on?
- Give an example of when you had to work under pressure. What were the circumstances and how did you accomplish the goal?
- What do you do to improve your skill set?
- What challenges are you hoping that this opportunity will bring?
- What do you do when you’re not working?
Questions for identifying a smart person
- Give an example of when you had to work with a difficult person. How did you deal with it?
- What kind of people annoy you the most or what do people often find annoying about you?
- Provide an example where you had to resolve a conflict with a co-worker or client. How did you resolve it?
- Describe a time when you were criticized. How did you deal with it?
- Tell me about the best boss you ever had. Now tell me about the worst boss you ever had. What made it tough to work with him or her?
In my experience, technical skills can be taught much more easily than people skills. So, I always start with the people skills.
How to identify if job candidates have the right IT support skills
After going through these questions, I move to a more technical conversation. I typically keep the questions simple. Again, if they have the right people skills and are eager to learn, it’s worth the investment in training the technical skill set.
The following questions I would categorize as simple general IT. I would expect anyone in IT to have a basic understanding and knowledge of these topics.
That said, I often interview people who claim to be level 1 or 2 helpdesk or even engineers who don’t have a grasp of these things. If you experience that, the candidate may not be a good fit. If they are selling themselves as a level 2 tech or engineer but don’t know general IT questions, there will likely be some issues in the humility department and that should be a big red flag.
If they are just getting started in IT and acknowledge that, they may still be a good candidate even if they aren’t able to answer some of the basic questions.
15 basic IT skills questions
- What is Active Directory?
- What does DHCP stand for and what is its purpose?
- What does DNS stand for and what is it used for?
- What is TCP/IP and what does it stand for?
- What is an IP address?
- What is the significance of the IP address 255.255.255.255?
- If your user was complaining of slowness on the network, what would you do?
- What is the difference between layer 2 and layer 3 in the OSI model?
- What is a VLAN?
- What is the difference between TCP and UDP?
- What are five important things that every organization should do to ensure information security?
- What are the most common cyber threats to an organization?
- What are the three major trends affecting the IT industry?
- What is the difference between a hub, switch, and router?
- You have a user call for support for the fifth time about the same issue. How would you handle the call and what would you do differently?
Next Steps
Starting or growing your IT team isn’t easy. We’ve done it many times and have developed a few resources that may help:
READ: How to Hire an IT Specialist
READ: Should I Build or Buy an IT Department?
READ: IT Manager Transition Checklist
READ: How Much Does IT Support Cost?
Our Learning Center has an entire section devoted to IT hiring and staffing.
If you would like more help with interviewing IT candidates or would like to consider alternatives to hiring a full in-house IT team, please consider booking a meeting with Thomas Kinsinger Director of Technology at E-N Computers.
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