Setting your candidate up for failure
I received feedback on a help desk candidate yesterday that gave me pause. The corporate recruiter who had interviewed him had asked a series of technical questions, and she said he had gotten some of them wrong.
Now, I’ve heard about this before. What happens is, some HR person who probably doesn’t know anything about IT (and to be honest, most of them really don’t- it’s not their specialty, after all) sits down with a list of questions and answers they’ve printed out, and starts firing them at the candidate.
Words cannot adequately express what a poor way this is to evaluate an IT candidate.
What non-IT people fail to understand about the IT field is that the person who comes to fix your computer doesn’t have some stored list of problems and solutions in his head. The successful practice of IT support is essentially nothing more than understanding the fundamental principles of the systems you are supporting, and interpreting their behavior to determine what’s causing it.
In other words, you can’t reliably answer a question about how to fix a computer without having a computer in front of you.
Thus, a help desk tech who is attempting to fix your computer can be brilliant at her job while also being atrocious at answering questions about how to fix a computer in the artificially contrived environment of an interview. This is just like when my mom tells me that her iTunes has once again stopped being able to retrieve track names from the CDDB. I know enough about iTunes to know that it needs an Internet connection to do that, but I can’t figure out what the specific problem is on my mom’s computer without sitting down in front of it (or using a remote desktop client to access it), checking her iTunes settings, checking her connection settings, and finally checking her firewall’s list of allowed applications- I can’t ask her to do that herself because I don’t have her firewall application’s menu structure memorized. I just have to sit down and look at it and figure it out. That doesn’t make me incompetent- it just makes me a troubleshooter.
It’s unfair, and more than that, it’s fundamentally inaccurate, to try to evaluate an IT person’s skills without actually sitting him or her down in front of a test environment, because even the best IT support staff don’t have a series of memorized screenshots stored in their brains for instant recall whenever a question arises. You wouldn’t ask your mechanic to describe how to fix your car without looking at it, and you shouldn’t ask a tech to describe how to fix your computer that way, either.