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11.01.07
IT Horror Stories: Interviewing
 By
Dan Morrill
I interview a lot of folks, I coach, I mentor, and I cull resumes with wild abandon.
I love this job because I get to meet people, lots of people, and help them get to where they want to go, but as with everything I need a little help from the folks who actually make it to the phone screen (about 10% of folks make it to phone screen). This is some helpful advice, from a person who is on the phone screening IT Candidates about 4 hours a day.
If you say you are an expert in C#, and you do not know how to manage page thrashing, and have never heard to the term, time to lower your score. If you have no ideas what threads are and insist that Microsoft uses a parent/child relationship in programs, it is time to lower your score. On a scale of 1 to 10, and if you give yourself a 9 or 10, that means that you fundamentally eat breath and live in C#, please understand the basic slang that goes along with it. If you do not know a classid from an instantiated object, time to lower your score.
If you call yourself an expert in IIS, and have no idea what webresource.axd and trace.axd are, time to move along and lower your score. Only 4 in 10 can answer this question at all.
If you think your kids playschool computer is what everyone should be using, you might be a redneck
If you call yourself an expert is MSSQL or any SQL and do not know how to answer this question, "I need a query that will pull data from a database and sort them ascending" then time to lower your score. Less than 1 in 10 can answer this question at all.
If you ask me why I didn't use interview questions like you expected, and you expected questions from such sites as Interview up, or my own favorite interview questions, well sorry to disappoint you, but you are interviewing for a specific job, I will interview you over job specific issues to see how you will address them or think about them to solve the problem.
Do not talk about a bomb, knife, gun, or attempt blackmail during the phone screen, I am not the one who will make the final decision, I am actually step 2 in 5 five step process. I do understand that you have not worked in a while, and now I know why.
Grammar, spelling, attention to detail, all are very important in a resume, especially if you are going to be writing code, or writing reports. How well you articulate on the telephone is also very important. Umm is not an action verb, nor does it suffice for a real answer to the question. It does not matter how brilliant you are, if you can not communicate, no one is going to know, and few will extend the benefit of the doubt. There are 20 more people behind you today and it is very busy.
Continue reading this article.
About
the Author:
Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.
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