You can certainly ask some of the same types of technical questions you might ask a more senior person (within reason based on their experience). But a good desktop support technician is going to see a wider variety of issues than your typical, more specialized senior sysadmin, so the important things are:
1) good with people (friendly, cheerful) 2) have good communication skills 3) resourceful 4) good troubleshooting instincts You could probably learn #4, but personally I think you're either born that way or not. If the person has those 4 qualities, they'll be successful no matter what their technical background. Scenarios are good for seeing how they think, and whether they ask the right questions. For example, if your scenario is that the video card is dead, pretend you are the user and tell the candidate that the monitor is blank. Let him/her walk you through the questions to get to the proper conclusion. Hopefully he/she will ask things like: "is the monitor plugged in?", "is the computer on," "is the light on the monitor green or orange?", "can I remote into your machine?", "would you feel comfortable setting down the phone and following the cable from the monitor to the machine?". Since you know the end result, you can answer the questions appropriately. Feel free to make your user personality more realistic by saying such things as "How do I tell if my computer is on?" (If you're sadistic, you could say something like "I have a meeting with the CEO in 5 minutes! I need to print this document!" Realistic, but cruel for an interview.) The other thing, which is probably obvious, is to try to gauge soft skills. Ask the person to describe to you how to brush your teeth as if you were blind and had never brushed your teeth before (or something like that). I've heard of people asking candidates to tell them how to tie their shoes over the phone. That seems unnecessarily cruel to me. Ask questions like: What was the most frustrating experience you ever had with a user? How did you resolve it? What was the kludgy-est solution you ever devised to solve a problem? It could be something you're proud of because it was resourceful, or something you're ashamed of but you learned from it. What was your favorite job (doesn't have to be IT)? What did you like about it? On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 12:33 PM, Darrell Fuhriman <darr...@garnix.org> wrote: > > Being a small company recently merged with an equally small company (ours is > software development.. theirs is decidedly not), I find myself in the > position of being a Senior SA and the sole full time IT person the company. > We're hiring somone to unburden me and to support a growing non-tech staff, > so I need to give tech interview a person whose job is probably 75% Desktop > Support (~2/3 Mac and 1/3 Windows for about 40 users) and 25% very Junior SA > (think SAGE Level 1-2). (As a bonus, this person will be working in a > different city from me.) > > Here's the problem: I am an ignoramus about desktop support and desktop > support issues, but since I'm the least unqualified person in the company, > it's my job to do the tech interview. > > I feel confident I can assess the quality of the answers, but I'm not really > sure what to ask. So I'm humbly looking for suggestions about how you would > go about interviewing a person for such a position. > > Thanks in advance, > > Darrell > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@lopsa.org > http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
