IT Hiring: 9 Essential Questions to Ask Candidates
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As employers, we know that it’s important to look beyond the bare technical qualifications on a candidate’s resume. When hiring for work in IT, factors such as soft skills and the ability to display initiative can be just as important in dictating performance. However, you’re not going to be able to establish this without asking candidates the right questions.
Of course, IT is a sector with a wide variety of roles with new job titles appearing as new technology emerges. Given this fact, you may want to give more weight to specific interview questions depending on the specializations you’re hiring for.
Linear yes/ no questions won’t be sufficient for generating an accurate profile of a candidate’s abilities and future potential. To figure out if someone is the best fit for the role you’ll need to engage their personality and pay close attention to how they frame their responses.
So if you want to find candidates that have both the right technical skills for the role and interpersonal qualities to grow your team, ask these interview questions to help separate the assets from the liabilities.
1. “Which online resources do you use for work?”
When IT workers are stuck on something, most of them will head to web forums like Stack Overflow where they can field their queries to other IT professionals. The kind of answers the candidate gives should provide some idea as to how passionate they are about the landscape of IT and whether they’ll be proactive and curious enough to find innovative solutions to tricky challenges.
2. “How do you keep up with developments in IT?”
Good IT workers know they live and die by their skillsets, and in the ever-changing world of IT, a drive to stay on top of changes in technology is essential. Signs that the candidate can be relied on to stay on their game might include any recent certifications they’ve acquired or any personal tech projects they’re working on in their spare time. Their answers will tell you a lot about how hungry they are to excel in their field.
"There's Always A Scope Of Improvement"
3. “Explain a tech concept in layman’s terms”
IT resources are integral to the success of virtually every modern industry, but that doesn’t mean that every stakeholder or executive will be intimately familiar with vital IT processes. You won’t always be able to rely on your business analyst to parse these concepts to people in other departments.
So a candidate who can clearly and simply break down an intricate idea will bring excellent communication skills to your team. Listen to see if they can avoid technical jargon in their answers to see how well they can represent your IT department to the rest of the company.
4. “Describe a time when you dealt with failure at work?”
Everyone has a time when they’ve been knocked down at work (especially if they’re ambitious), but it’s how we come back from failure that proves the measure of our character. Ask them how they tried to navigate a problem, what they learned from failing, and what they would do differently in the future. Their answers can tell you a lot about their professional fortitude and how they might handle pressure.
5. “How will advances in technology affect your position?”
Instead of asking “where do you see yourself in five years?”, challenge candidates as to how developments in technology will affect their position. Most IT jobs will be subject to changes in technology, and you want to establish how much long-term awareness a candidate has about the future.
Are they aware that automated testing is having a major impact on development cycles? How do they see their field being impacted by big data or machine learning? Do they have ambitions to work more closely with AI? This question will give you an insight into their time horizons for the industry and whether they’re abreast of the long-term direction for the tech sector.
6. “Describe any side projects that you’ve worked on in your free time?”
Talented IT professionals are curious by nature. They want to poke and probe to establish the limits of a concept and enjoy constructing new software processes. Someone who is willing to spend their free time working on an app or trying to code a game has a passion and drive for IT, and sees it as something more than just a way to pay the rent.
Curious candidates are also more likely to enjoy learning new processes and can bring initiative and flair to a role. Ask them what got them interested in the project in the first place, and what motivated them to stick with it. If the project in question is something that they can show during the interview, so much the better.
7. “When did you last give a presentation?”
The modern IT specialist can’t work in a vacuum. They need to be able to work through ideas or project alterations with other team members, liaise with external departments and convince others about the value of their work.
We don’t need every tech worker to be Noam Chomsky, but they should have sufficient communication skills to advocate for their work and be able to walk stakeholders through crucial tech concepts.
"There's Always A Scope Of Improvement"
8. “What qualities make a successful leader?”
Even if the position being interview for roles that don’t involve leadership, it pays to keep an eye out for candidates who may possess the right attributes enabling them to helm projects or step up to extra responsibilities in the future. The often fractured nature of IT work means team members will often have to assume responsibilities for project delivery and hitting deadlines.
Some qualities you could look out for include:
- Organization: could the candidate help keep a project on track?
- Drive: do they have the ability to work through a crunch and deal with pressure?
- Outlook: would they stay positive and help keep the team’s morale high in challenging situations?
- Delegation: do they have the capacity to delegate work when doing so would benefit a project’s outcome?
9. “Why do you want to join our company?”
This question is relevant to the hiring process regardless of the industry. Someone who’s hungry for the job will have done their homework about your firm and be able to hold a conversation about the field you work in, your company’s USPs, and your approach to business.
The inability to adequately answer this question shows a lack of effort and initiative on the candidate’s part, and there’s no reason to think their attitude to their work would be any better.
These questions should help you get a solid grasp of a candidate’s attitude to the field of IT and to their work. By asking the right questions, you can vet bad apples while finding new hires whose value you might otherwise have overlooked.
Remember to give them an opportunity to ask you questions at the end of the interview that could prove similarly insightful for your hiring process. A new employee is an investment in the future of your business, and your interview technique needs to be able to identify the valuable qualities a candidate might possess that are impossible to express through a resume.
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