How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@Tim_G said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
The problem, is that if you are not skilled enough yourself, you won't know what to ask and look for. If you don't know about something, then how will you think to ask about it and properly evaluate someone's skill regarding it?
Example of this... I knew the most standard Solaris question in interviews at a place where I worked was "What are the four running processes of NFS?" They asked this in every single interview that I didn't run.
Problem was.. candidates often knew more than the interviewers so this question would confuse them because they had to assume that the interviewer knew the answer. But in reality, the interviewers had all memorized this and didn't actually know that they all had it wrong. And they had it REALLY wrong.
- NFS is not one thing and there were several different potentially correct answers.
- The list that they had wasn't QUITE accurate.
- NFS only requires two, but often uses four.
So they always evaluated people as positive when actually having gotten the answer wrong. And marking against the people who rightfully got confused. They made assumptions and thought that they were right, but actually didn't know enough about the topic to realize they were asking something that wasn't answerable without loads of false assumptions that they were not filling anyone in on.
Plus, what a horrible question anyway. Sounds like an A+ question. I'm so glad that type of thinking is dying off.
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@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@Tim_G said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
The problem, is that if you are not skilled enough yourself, you won't know what to ask and look for. If you don't know about something, then how will you think to ask about it and properly evaluate someone's skill regarding it?
Example of this... I knew the most standard Solaris question in interviews at a place where I worked was "What are the four running processes of NFS?" They asked this in every single interview that I didn't run.
Problem was.. candidates often knew more than the interviewers so this question would confuse them because they had to assume that the interviewer knew the answer. But in reality, the interviewers had all memorized this and didn't actually know that they all had it wrong. And they had it REALLY wrong.
- NFS is not one thing and there were several different potentially correct answers.
- The list that they had wasn't QUITE accurate.
- NFS only requires two, but often uses four.
So they always evaluated people as positive when actually having gotten the answer wrong. And marking against the people who rightfully got confused. They made assumptions and thought that they were right, but actually didn't know enough about the topic to realize they were asking something that wasn't answerable without loads of false assumptions that they were not filling anyone in on.
Plus, what a horrible question anyway. Sounds like an A+ question. I'm so glad that type of thinking is dying off.
Too bad it is dying off so slowly. I've been campaigning against this for at least a decade if not more. These types of interviews are completely capricious.
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@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Plus, what a horrible question anyway. Sounds like an A+ question.
Yeah, not the kind of thing you'd ever need to know. And trivial to look up. And loads of really qualified people simply never work with NFS before that job. NFS is pretty standard, but still, lots had not (I was lucky, I had in the job just before so I breezed that question based on assumptions and luck) and those that haven't used it can learn it in, you know, ten minutes or so.
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Plus, what a horrible question anyway. Sounds like an A+ question.
Yeah, not the kind of thing you'd ever need to know. And trivial to look up. And loads of really qualified people simply never work with NFS before that job. NFS is pretty standard, but still, lots had not (I was lucky, I had in the job just before so I breezed that question based on assumptions and luck) and those that haven't used it can learn it in, you know, ten minutes or so.
I don't know on UNIX but I only know of nfs, rpc-bind, and mountd on RHEL. Debian it's nfs-kernel-server or some crap like that. But knowing those don't help me do my job any better.
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@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Plus, what a horrible question anyway. Sounds like an A+ question.
Yeah, not the kind of thing you'd ever need to know. And trivial to look up. And loads of really qualified people simply never work with NFS before that job. NFS is pretty standard, but still, lots had not (I was lucky, I had in the job just before so I breezed that question based on assumptions and luck) and those that haven't used it can learn it in, you know, ten minutes or so.
I don't know on UNIX but I only know of nfs, rpc-bind, and mountd on RHEL. Debian it's nfs-kernel-server or some crap like that. But knowing those don't help me do my job any better.
Even on RHEL the version matters. It will vary.
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Plus, what a horrible question anyway. Sounds like an A+ question.
Yeah, not the kind of thing you'd ever need to know. And trivial to look up. And loads of really qualified people simply never work with NFS before that job. NFS is pretty standard, but still, lots had not (I was lucky, I had in the job just before so I breezed that question based on assumptions and luck) and those that haven't used it can learn it in, you know, ten minutes or so.
I don't know on UNIX but I only know of nfs, rpc-bind, and mountd on RHEL. Debian it's nfs-kernel-server or some crap like that. But knowing those don't help me do my job any better.
Even on RHEL the version matters. It will vary.
Right. This is all 7. No idea what it was before 6.
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@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Plus, what a horrible question anyway. Sounds like an A+ question.
Yeah, not the kind of thing you'd ever need to know. And trivial to look up. And loads of really qualified people simply never work with NFS before that job. NFS is pretty standard, but still, lots had not (I was lucky, I had in the job just before so I breezed that question based on assumptions and luck) and those that haven't used it can learn it in, you know, ten minutes or so.
I don't know on UNIX but I only know of nfs, rpc-bind, and mountd on RHEL. Debian it's nfs-kernel-server or some crap like that. But knowing those don't help me do my job any better.
Even on RHEL the version matters. It will vary.
Right. This is all 7. No idea what it was before 6.
I mean the NFS versions. NFS 2, 3 and 4 have different processes.
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Plus, what a horrible question anyway. Sounds like an A+ question.
Yeah, not the kind of thing you'd ever need to know. And trivial to look up. And loads of really qualified people simply never work with NFS before that job. NFS is pretty standard, but still, lots had not (I was lucky, I had in the job just before so I breezed that question based on assumptions and luck) and those that haven't used it can learn it in, you know, ten minutes or so.
I don't know on UNIX but I only know of nfs, rpc-bind, and mountd on RHEL. Debian it's nfs-kernel-server or some crap like that. But knowing those don't help me do my job any better.
Even on RHEL the version matters. It will vary.
Right. This is all 7. No idea what it was before 6.
I mean the NFS versions. NFS 2, 3 and 4 have different processes.
Ooooh ok. I got you.
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@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@stacksofplates said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Plus, what a horrible question anyway. Sounds like an A+ question.
Yeah, not the kind of thing you'd ever need to know. And trivial to look up. And loads of really qualified people simply never work with NFS before that job. NFS is pretty standard, but still, lots had not (I was lucky, I had in the job just before so I breezed that question based on assumptions and luck) and those that haven't used it can learn it in, you know, ten minutes or so.
I don't know on UNIX but I only know of nfs, rpc-bind, and mountd on RHEL. Debian it's nfs-kernel-server or some crap like that. But knowing those don't help me do my job any better.
Even on RHEL the version matters. It will vary.
Right. This is all 7. No idea what it was before 6.
I mean the NFS versions. NFS 2, 3 and 4 have different processes.
Ooooh ok. I got you.
Yeah, at some point they switched how the communications were handled. Can't remember the details but it was like from using RPC to something native and so it reduced the listening processes dramatically.
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And of course the implementation matters. There is NFS native, but also third party NFS and ZFS NFS all with different processes.
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Perhaps someone could write a guide on how to get your CV past the 23 year old HR major that cant do anything with technology except text and email? Just about every time I have ever had an interview ive been offered a job, but getting past the HR drone...
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@momurda said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Perhaps someone could write a guide on how to get your CV past the 23 year old HR major that cant do anything with technology except text and email? Just about every time I have ever had an interview ive been offered a job, but getting past the HR drone...
Consider it a good thing, good companies don't have HR drones, ever. You actually want to be filtered out by those people to make your job of selecting a job easier. It's one of the reasons I take my education and certs off of my CV. I specifically want to be filtered out by bad companies (e.g. I want to filter them out before I waste time talking to them.)
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@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
- You must have someone doing the hiring that is dramatically more skills and experienced than the person you are hiring. This is the case for all jobs, not just IT. If the person interviewing is confused because the interviewee knows way more than them, they will just as likely think that the person is an idiot as a genius because they don't know enough to know if the person is right or wrong (seen this a lot.)
How? Are you suggesting firms should employ you to do the hiring or something? That's not normally practical.
Cost to hire a bozo and not fire him for 90 days.
Use cut rate recruiter who charges 10% = $8K
20K Salary.
7K Benefits.
40K to operations being impacted (outages, work not getting done).Cost to hire me to interview candidates and help you go thru resumes ($250HR, for 30 hours) ~$7500
One of these looks a HELL of a lot cheaper to me....
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@momurda said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
Perhaps someone could write a guide on how to get your CV past the 23 year old HR major that cant do anything with technology except text and email? Just about every time I have ever had an interview ive been offered a job, but getting past the HR drone...
Consider it a good thing, good companies don't have HR drones, ever. You actually want to be filtered out by those people to make your job of selecting a job easier. It's one of the reasons I take my education and certs off of my CV. I specifically want to be filtered out by bad companies (e.g. I want to filter them out before I waste time talking to them.)
My last 3 times getting hired...
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Recruiter sets me up with a meeting with the CEO and IT Director. Talk to IT director for an hour, get an offer. No HR involvement.
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Former Vendor who remembered having a good talk with me about VOIP and storage calls and asks me to go to coffee. Go to coffee with VP of company.
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Chief Technologist for BU messages me on Twitter asking if I'd be interested in a roll. Makes sure I get an interview with Hiring manager. Recruiter involved, but more to see if I was interested and work out logistics for my flights.
None of these companies had HR that filtered IT hires. Particularly past the first job my skill level was above that. If your more than 2-3 years in this industry and have that as a problem the guide isn't on how to bypass them but how to Network (I go to a lot of conferences and maximize my time meeting people), get involved in influencer programs (I'm in vExpert and Veeam Vanguard) write good technical blogs (done a few of these), get on podcasts (done a LOT of these), and connect with other experts (I spend a lot of time on private slack channels).
Previous interviews I've done....
- VP of company messages me on linked in asking if I can meet him for lunch. Remembers me from a meeting, where I impressed his head of ops.
I've hired ~8 people over the years and NEVER was HR involved in "filtering" beyond an after the fact doing criminal background checks and telling me if someone tripped a flag.
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@John-Nicholson said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
I've hired ~8 people over the years and NEVER was HR involved in "filtering" beyond an after the fact doing criminal background checks and telling me if someone tripped a flag.
Same here. Haven't seen HR involved in as long as I can remember. Was always a fear, but an unfounded one. From mom and pop jobs to the Fortune 100, never seen HR get in the middle of the process. HR has been involved, but normally only after everything was done and they were just handling the paperwork for the final offer and talking benefits.
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
And of course the implementation matters. There is NFS native, but also third party NFS and ZFS NFS all with different processes.
NFS v3 was always stateless, v4 can have state (some people think this was a bad idea). v4 can do session trunking VERY rarely supported though and Kerberos because of this.
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@IRJ said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
- Most enterprise companies are requiring at least 90 days as a contractor with limited access to make sure you are who you say you are
SMBs want to try to avoid this. It's very costly to have people sitting around idle for a long time, especially if they represent 50% of your IT workforce during that period, instead of .1% of it, and them having nothing to do but get paid to look for even better jobs.
Outside of the DoD or federal requirement shops this isn't common. I was on our R&D networks and engineering wiki's within hours of being hired. We hire contractors but for specific reasons, not as a weird arms length W-2 employee nonsense.
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@Tim_G said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
But I could recruit an IT support technician, even though I'd hopefully know less about IT than the candidate - because I know something about IT.
how would you do that? If the candidate knows more than you, how would you know if he was bluffing or if he was amazing? Wouldn't they seem the same?
Headhunter: "How do you fix a VM that is non-responsive in KVM."
You: "In the options, you change the setting to use left-handed keyboard and then it should start responding to ctrl+alt+delete so you can reset the virtual CPU cache."Now if a headhunter knows nothing about IT, that may seem like an amazing answer.... maybe not, but just trying to make a point.
Why would a headhunter be playing IT trivial? A headhunter shares what the role is supposed to be, discusses benefits to make sure it will fit your salary requirements and sets up interviews.
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@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
OK, so you're talking about employing someone, not a headhunter, to do the hiring. Someone who knows more about IT than the candidates. How do you employ that person? I could employ Jared. But how do I know if Jared is bluffing or is amazing? According to you I shouldn't be able to tell.
You can tell, because he's someone you can't hire. That's the handy part.
I know nothing about Jared's real-life circumstances. I used him as an example of someone who is able to answer my questions in a clear, logical and (to me) knowledgeable way. He could be on minimum wage for all I know.
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@John-Nicholson said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@Carnival-Boy said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:
- You must have someone doing the hiring that is dramatically more skills and experienced than the person you are hiring. This is the case for all jobs, not just IT. If the person interviewing is confused because the interviewee knows way more than them, they will just as likely think that the person is an idiot as a genius because they don't know enough to know if the person is right or wrong (seen this a lot.)
How? Are you suggesting firms should employ you to do the hiring or something? That's not normally practical.
Cost to hire a bozo and not fire him for 90 days.
Use cut rate recruiter who charges 10% = $8K
20K Salary.
7K Benefits.
40K to operations being impacted (outages, work not getting done).Cost to hire me to interview candidates and help you go thru resumes ($250HR, for 30 hours) ~$7500
One of these looks a HELL of a lot cheaper to me....
I'm an IT Manager and recruitment is a key part of my role. I've recruited loads of IT staff over the years and have yet to hire a bozo. Sometimes their character turns out to be wanting, or they can't fit in to the company culture, but that can be very hard to identify during recruitment. But technically they've all been fine.
In small firms where there is no in-house IT expertise and they're trying to recruit then employing you makes great sense. How else can they identify if the candidates no anything about IT? But as an IT Manager recruiting and running IT teams, if I had to pay you to identify competent staff over bozos then I'd have question why the hell I'm doing my job. That was the original point I was making.
