Interview Tips | IT Tech Support

Hiring the right technical support is crucial to your business, but many such interviews are botched by well-meaning managers. Knowing the right issues to focus on and the right questions to ask is crucial. Here are the questions that quality technical professionals want to hear, which demonstrates that the interviewer's company knows what to look for and, hence, will probably be a good place to work.

Focus on Skills, Not Years
The first sign of a sloppy interviewer is when too much importance is on the number of years dedicated to a single programming language, such as eight years of Java programming experience. Technical fields move very quickly, and good technical professionals will deliberately learn multiple languages in order to maximize their skills. It is quite possible for a mediocre programmer to spend eight years doing the same thing by rote in a given language; more impressive is the programmer who has only five years of work experience, but who has applied them to multiple areas of expertise that expose him to many areas of best practices.

The worst-case scenario is the manager who required "ten years of AJAX experience," only two years after AJAX had been invented; this did not raise the opinion of that employer in the eyes of the many expert programmers who forwarded that job requirement to one another, for the good laugh it provided.

Managers who find themselves in the role of hiring outside their own expertise should find an internal resource to help them with these details; either bring an existing hire on board to the new hire process to help refine these technical questions, or hire an outside consultant to advise you. The cost of doing so is far lower than the cost of a bad hire.

Know Which Skills Are Interchangeable
The technical field is both broad and deep; in some positions, you want the professional who can apply himself across multiple technologies, while in others you prefer the guru on a single technology. If you need someone with deep technical knowledge about your installed base of Apache and Postfix servers, you don't want to hire someone with extensive experience managing Microsoft's IIS and Exchange servers (and vice versa)--even though both broadly provide similar services. Under the hood, the necessary skills are very different. On the other hand, a Java programmer may be very well suited to making the transition to C# and Objective-C programming. All of these are object-oriented programming languages, making extensive use of shared code libraries; good programming practices in one will frequently translate to another.

Don't Skip the Human Factor
Finally, many technical professionals are expert with computers, but not so much with people. If you have the kind of needs where you can metaphorically lock your hire into a closet until he produces his finished work, his business social skills are less important--but few projects meet this description. A good professional needs to be able to understand the English language requests made of him, ask the right questions, and then convert that into technical requirements. For many professionals, it's much easier to learn new technical skills than how to interact, so you may want to focus on the latter skills in your interview.