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Questions for Entry Level PC Techs?
Rick Zeman asks: "For the first time ever, I have to interview and hire (I'm not management, so an exception is being made) what we call a 'PC Technician', which is an entry-level IT person. While actual computer knowledge and how we do things can be taught, how to think, and the aptitude for troubleshooting can't be. In the readers' experiences, what are the best (legal in the US!) questions to ask an entry-level candidate to really evaluate them? They don't have the resumes, the skills, or the experience yet, so I think they have to be judged on other factors that are harder to qualify."
I'm not sure what is entailed by 'technician', but I'm assuming that they will need *at least* some troubleshooting skills. Even non technical ones. I remember when I got a job doing tech support and the preliminary interviewer asked me a question: "I'm thinking of a product in a grocery store, find out what it is in less than 15 questions."
They didn't care that I had any IT background; they could provide me the training to fix issues, but I needed first to have the skills to find out what they were. I would suggest following a similar pattern. You've got people with little experience, skills, and knowledge concerning the subject matter, but the basics of logical deduction will get you the most value as an employer.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
I spent the last year in Paris working at a school as an entry level technician and often had to solve problems that I didn't know anything about. The skill to doing this is being a fast learner and also to know how to go about solving a new problem.
I suggest you give them a problem which they probably don't know how to solve and ask them to talk through their process. This could involve some quick research on google or using common sense, etc etc. Its feasible that someone with very little tech experience could do this job as long as they have a quick brain and good common sense.
The next most important thing is social skills and the ability to get on with their users. I know how common it is to have to deal with people who know nothing about computers. You could play the role of a retarded user, or even better, get someone else involved who really is a novice and get your interviewee to train them to do something. You observe their social skills and how they interact with the novice.
1) Ask them hard question, get them to talk through their process of trying to solve it
2) Give them a task of training a novice to do something, or act as a novice yourself. Ask very novicey questions to see if you can frustrate them. Patience is a virtue needed for IT tech jobs.
3) Get them to talk through a spyware infestation, a virus infestation. Make up some hypotheticals to ask them. Example: Someone calls you up and say's their internet is broken, what do you ask them first? Go through the scenario step by step and see what they do.
It's fairly easy to see quite quickly who are the people who are sharp thinkers with good inter-personal skills. It's also fairly easy to pick those people up who know what they're talking about. Ask them to recommend a virus scanner, if they say Norton, kick them out of our office immediately! They should know about programs like AVG, Avast, Stinger.