Interview Questions/Activity

Well my boss has scheduled some interviews for a technical position. He is asking me to help come up with some questions and an activity for the interviewees. Does anyone have a good 10-15 task a person could do? The position is for an entry level person that will be troubleshooting computers. I was thinking of taking the RAM out of a desktop or something similar and let them troubleshoot it. Any other ideas?

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Comments

dynamik

Take everything apart and have them put it back together.

Then make them take it apart again, so it's ready for the next candidate.

phantasm

Find some faulty RAM and install it along side some good RAM into a PC. Make sure it errors on boot.

Give him/her an IDE drive and ask them to install it into a system that runs on SATA.

That's all I can think of right now, are the computers in your company old or new?

undomiel

Install the cmos battery loosely. Loose sata/ide cables. Put in faulty ram if you have it, otherwise just put a stick in their but don't seat it properly. Delete the boot.ini. Delete some registery files. Delete the video drivers. That should give you a few ideas to work with. Combine some of them to make for a more interesting troubleshooting experience.

dratnol

Thanks for the ideas! I will add some of them into the interview for my boss.

laidbackfreak

personally id look at the typical problems you currently face and put some of those in there, least that way your gonna find out if they can be of use in your place.....

networker050184

laidbackfreak wrote:

personally id look at the typical problems you currently face and put some of those in there, least that way your gonna find out if they can be of use in your place.....

+1

Not much use having them strip down machines looking for bad hardware if that isn't something they will be doing on the job very often. I'd run some of the basic scenarios you see on a daily basis by them.

TechJunky

Unplug the pwr jumper from the motherboard.
Turn the floppy cable around and cause a floppy disk not found on boot error
Put a floppy disk in the floppy drive and try and boot to winnt win2k or xp and give them the boot error.

I agree, simple things that happen on a normal basis.

Ask them how they would remove a virus, IE: Safe Mode, Turn off the recovery feature etc.

Dont do something radical that would cause you to loose a potential good employee.

Good Luck!

Bokeh

Last time I interviewed for a position, they asked stuff like the difference between a hub and switch, whats the internal address of a NIC card, how do you purge print jobs, show me how to make a patch cable.

I like the above mentioned items as well. Even simple one is to turn the switch off on the back of a power supply (if they have it) and also unplug power to motherboard. You'd be surprise how many find the power cable unplugged, but don't check the switch on the supply. "Must be bad, I'd install a new one."

jryantech

Sounds like he is going to be tested on the A+ Certification objectives

I agree with the others who have said make sure it is tuned to the job...

loxleynew

Yea sounds like an A+ certification to me! lol. Whatever you do make sure it's what they actually will be doing. Rebuilding a computer or fixing the power on the motherboard is highly unlikely unless that's what they will be doing?

oo_snoopy

Bokeh wrote:

Last time I interviewed for a position, they asked stuff like the difference between a hub and switch

Oh that's easy

Hubs are used for transparently gaining access to someone's network and sniffing packets, using arp attacks, and generally doing bad things!

ITdude

oo_snoopy wrote:

Bokeh wrote:

Last time I interviewed for a position, they asked stuff like the difference between a hub and switch

Oh that's easy

Hubs are used for transparently gaining access to someone's network and sniffing packets, using arp attacks, and generally doing bad things!

Yes, but is that the Cisco answer?

msteinhilber

As others have said, match the activity to mimic something that may occur on the job.

When I was managing a computer shop I generally was hiring for either a sales role or a tech role. Sales applicants I always gave them a stack of our various price sheets when they dropped off a resume or application. If they got an interview I always enjoyed telling them to sell me a computer, not many of them thought "why did he hand me a stack of price sheets" when they dropped off their resume so generally the ones who made an effort to understand them before the interview and actually were able to reference them as if they already knew them typically got the job unless they sucked at sales anyways.

Tech people had to diagnose a machine, one of my favorites which happens fairly often being a retail shop is the DIY PC builder "expert" who buy's all the parts from you and then brings it all in pissed off because it wont post (because they mounted the motherboard without the use of standoffs). I liked to throw together a PC with crappy parts without standoffs and throw that one at tech applicants since it isn't always something you tend to look for immediately.

kripsak

A really good test that I went through once. The guys put a honeypot file that kept on opening new windows, even though your first intention is to disable at startup. The best way was to delete from command prompt at startup.