So frustrated with job seekers

unclerico

Ok, so for those of you out there looking for a new job take a look at your resume and compare it against the job description. Do you have verifiable experience with the vast majority of what the job description details? When I say verifiable I mean you have hands on production knowledge not verifiable as in you read a white paper, a magazine article, or a book.

I am sick and tired of candidates that have a fantastic looking resume, but when it comes down to it they don't know WTF they are talking about! Sorry to rant, but I have wasted about 4 hours of my life interviewing people for my old position and they can't answer simple questions about the subjects that they claim to have 5+ years implementing and/or supporting.

Look at your resume and go over your skills that you have listed. If you can't rattle off how it works without looking it up, don't put it on there! When it comes time for the technical interview you wont be able to hide!

ptilsen

Just to play devil's advocate, what kind of questions are you asking and how simple are they? I'm not saying they are or aren't, but answering something on the spot is often harder than applying it in production, especially during an interview.

I once had an interviewer ask me to name the FSMO roles on what they do. Actually, I've had that happen three or four times. On a good day, I can not only name them, but explain which are domain-limited and which are forest-limited, describe their functions in-depth, discuss practical issues with their placement, and even talk about their history between versions. On a really good day, I can remember the commands to query them with netdom and transfer them with ntdsutil, step-by-step. On a bad day, I might not even be able to name them. But any day, I can recognize their relevance to production problems and place them logically, regardless of how well I remember them in an interview. Ironically, the one time I blanked was the only interview that really needed that knowledge, where the interviewer really cared if I knew it off-hand. I probably didn't get the job because of that, and frankly that was probably a mistake on their part as much as it was on mine (that position stayed open for a while, too).

Again, I'm not saying your questions are too hard or too easy or that my anecdote applies universally. You might be asking reasonable questions and getting horrible answers. I just want to get the idea out there that what might feel like simple knowledge can feel like a tricky "gotcha" in an interview to a candidate. I like to ask good technical questions during interviews, but I don't necessarily need the interviewee to remember all the specifics off-hand. How they answer is usually more important than whether they know the answer. And for questions like my FSMO question above, let's be honest: Do you really need to remember that, or are you reasonably going to look it up bits you've forgotten when you need it?